A Candle Burns
by EvenAtMyDarkest
Summary: "Dean tilts back his head, opening his mouth wide, and a plume of black smoke issues from his lips." The end of 10x03 Soul Survivor doesn't go quite so favorably for Team Free Will, and the remaining members are gonna have their work cut out for them trying to bring Dean home. Season 10 AU. Gets pretty dark.
1. Black

_I own nothing. Except the way these words are put together._

* * *

In the weeks leading up to Dean's death at the hands of Metatron, Sam noticed his eyes more often than usual. And it was something he'd been noticing for years. Particularly when he thought Sam wasn't looking. He'd run a hand down his face, he'd sigh a silent sigh, and the light in his eyes would flicker out as he stopped pouring fuel onto the flames in a desperate bid to keep Sammy from worrying.

For so many years he was _so_ tired, and he was so good at hiding it that Sam often forgot, but every once in a while those moments would come, and Sam would see him for what he really was, and he would lie awake at night paralyzed with helplessness.

The only demons he's never found a way to kill are the ones inside Dean.

And now that has become so much more literal than his darkest nightmares could ever have conceived.

He flees from the door as it becomes clear that Dean is breaking it down no matter what he says. He needs more time to think of a way to restrain him. Because his brother-turned-monster is right—if either of them is going to kill the other, it'll be Dean who sees the light of another day. Sam knows that it's his responsibility to keep the demon from being unleashed on the world.

But if it comes to a decision between killing Dean and putting strangers' lives on the line, that responsibility is going to crush him.

 _Coward_ , hisses that voice in the back of his mind that always says what he doesn't want to hear but needs to.

He creeps down the hallway, heart pounding so hard he fears Dean might hear it, wherever he is. His brother's voice echoes around him, taunting him—" _I'm tired of playing; let's finish this game_ "—and you know, he really can buy that this is just a game to Dean. Or the thing that used to be Dean, anyway.

 _If Dean kills me, will he ever come to regret it?_

 _Will he live long enough to?_

 _Will Cas let him?_

With every new question the knot in his gut twists his insides with exponentially increasing force, sharp and merciless. And all the while he's trying to breathe as quietly as possible, and his heart will not calm down, and the long hallways that used to be almost familiar enough to call "home"—something he thought he'd never find again—suddenly appear as huge, threatening structures hiding, somewhere, someone who also isn't as familiar as he should be.

He can't die at Dean's hands; he would be avoiding killing his brother, sure, but far worse things would come after.

But if it comes to making an impossible choice, how—

He's thinking more than he's paying attention as he turns around and that's never a good thing. All he sees is the hammer about to bury itself into the side of his head, and he loses track of his heartbeat as he ducks, and his hand shoots out of its own accord, knowing what to do after years of experience, and he finds himself holding a knife to his brother's throat.

The hammer instead embeds itself into the wall right next to where his head just was, and Dean releases it conciliatorily. His mouth stretches to the sides in what appears to be a smile, but there's no emotion behind it. Some subhuman brand of amusement, perhaps, but no actual happiness.

It's too similar to the expression Sam saw him wear time and time again even back when he was himself. It's damn near _identical_. Just… more careless.

"Well," murmurs his brother, holding his hand out nonthreateningly, flippantly. "Look at you."

 _Stop, Dean_ , screams the side of his brain he's charged with holding onto hope, no matter how irrational it is. _Just stop. You think I want this?_

"Do it," Dean goads, even as his eyes broadcast loud and clear what his expectations are. For a moment he clenches his teeth, jaw tightening, and Sam can hear what he doesn't say loud and clear: _Man up, Sammy. Your excuse not to is gone. You have no reason to hold back. Don't disappoint me again._

"It's all you," he urges, and he's right, and all of a sudden, for what feels like the first time, it occurs to Sam that he _could_. Just shove this blade forward into his brother's throat an inch or so and watch the pale glow spread all under his skin, flooding every single blood vessel, until the remains of Dean Winchester are no more and the body crumples and his pain is over and the world is safe from him.

And the last flicker of light in his eyes dies out forever.

The demon is staring him down, and no fear is apparent in his features, nor any indication of the outcome he's hoping for. Only the one in whose certainty he rests. But not because the other is technically impossible.

Sam could.

Of course, he never would.

He lets the knife drop from under Dean's chin, feeling stupid for ever thinking he could do it, hating everything about what is happening, just wanting it to be over, even if it means making the worst choice in the world: to do nothing.

In the moment between his submission and his certain death, he meets the once-dead eyes of his brother.

Those eyes are burning now. Awash in the anticipated triumph just before the kill. And this is so far off what Sam actually wanted that he's sure it's the universe purposely screwing him over.

He hasn't even raised a finger yet before Cas is wrapping his arms around him from behind like a clamp, and Sam is left standing there watching, mind going blank, knees going weak.

"It's over," Cas tells Dean firmly, but the words sound hollow to Sam. All he can see are the two black holes in his brother's face.

Dean's grunting in surprise and frustration, and he struggles against the angel, but angels have always been stronger than demons and that's not about to change.

So Dean tilts back his head, opening his mouth wide, and lets out a guttural bellow that carries something underneath his voice more characteristic of a beast than a man.

And a plume of black smoke issues from his lips.

" _Dean_ ," Sam hears himself scream, but his uninjured hand is going up to shield himself, as everyone's hands always do when they behold the true noncorporeal form of a demon, because they know on an instinctive level that they are in the presence of true evil. Pure evil. There is. No. Good. In. Them.

How Sam managed to make himself forget that is no mystery at all, but never mind that—because before him looms the shadowy form of his brother, his _big brother_ who is supposed to be _human_ , who is only _not_ human _because he was good._ He was so good that he put even his own soul on the line, no questions asked, and now he is effectively gone and everyone who cares about him is paying the price.

Sam bolts down the hall after the retreating cloud of ashen smoke, his emotional and physical exhaustion forgotten. Cas is calling his name behind him, but he doesn't care.

He has never attempted to chase a demon that's unburdened by a body before, and he doesn't even have the beginning of a plan in the event of him actually catching up to it, but quite unsurprisingly, it turns out that not having a body is a distinct advantage as far as speed. Sam skids around a corner and glimpses the last wisps of black smoke vanishing into a ventilation shaft a hundred feet down the hall.

He stands there, shoulders heaving, every muscle itching to keep running even though it was ludicrous to even start. And then there are footsteps behind him. Cas's voice saying his name again.

Sam turns, his feet like deadweights. He doesn't want to see this. He doesn't want to see this at all.

Just a few steps bring him within sight of Dean's empty body lying loosely on the hard floor, one arm lain awkwardly across his chest, head rolled to the side. Sam unconsciously picks up the pace as he approaches. When he's standing right next to his brother's head is when he finally lets himself sink to his knees. His legs have done enough holding him up for one day. He's not looking far enough ahead to know when he'll stand up again.

Dean's eyes are closed, just like those of every victim of possession who turns out to be dead post-exorcism. Except this body isn't dead or damaged at all. Just vacant.

"I'm so sorry," Cas says behind him, obvious regret thick in his voice. "I should have covered his mouth. I wasn't thinking."

Sam grasps Dean's body by the shoulders and pulls it to his chest, holding it close without being held in return, like he's done too many times in his life. Hell, this is the second time he's done it since the last time Dean died.

This challenge may be the most complex he's ever faced, and he hesitates even to call it that—"challenge" implies he has a game plan. Like he has the first idea where to go from here.

But this utter cluelessness would still be totally manageable if he just had Dean. They always find a way. All they really need is each other, and they've always known that. Agreed upon it.

He clutches the empty shell of his broken brother, silence enveloping him on all sides except within.

He wills that to settle down too.

It's simpler, healthier, in this moment, to tell himself that Dean's only dead.

* * *

 _There is a fair chance that I'll continue this. Depends on its reception I guess. If I could trouble you for a review on the way out that would be much appreciated._


	2. Vacancy

_Welp, it's not a one-shot. Thanks for the interest, guys. No promises as far as update frequency, but there will be more at some point. Merry Christmas!_

* * *

For the first few hours after Sam carries Dean's empty body to his bed, Cas disappears to parts unknown. Sam's game plan for the moment is to get so drunk he can't see straight. But after the first swig of gin, all he can really do is stare at the bottle sitting on the table in front of him, shivering every few minutes. Suggestions generated by some distant part of his brain flit past him every once in a while—he should sleep, he should hit the books, he should start working on some kind of plan. None of it sounds appealing nor worthwhile. All he's really done is draw warding around Dean's body. If he tries coming back, he won't find an available meatsuit waiting for him. Though that is a small comfort.

He doesn't catch it when Cas first appears but when he suddenly registers the angel's presence he surmises that he couldn't have been here more than a few seconds. The abrupt arrival somehow reminds him of his single short-term goal, and he lifts the bottle of gin to his lips, and grimaces as he swallows. For some reason he assumed Cas would speak before he finished the swig, but silence has settled over the room, so Sam says without taking his eyes off the bottle, the tiredness in his voice obvious, "How the hell are we gonna get him back, Cas?"

His best guess is that Cas has been somewhere in the bunker doing research for all this time. For this reason the long pause after his question is extremely disheartening. Finally, though, Cas responds, "It's a rare occasion when we know exactly how we're going to solve a problem anytime before the moment we do."

A surprised chuckle escapes Sam, quickly cut short by an irrational stab of guilt at his ability to laugh.

"This is more or less unprecedented," says Cas after a moment of silence. "Having a demon flee a living body that didn't have anyone inside it. Do you think there's anything we need to do to preserve the body?"

Sam shudders visibly, but he shrugs. "Your guess is as good as mine. Like you said, we have no frame of reference here. Except Cain. And we haven't exactly got him on speed dial. But I mean… he's still breathing. It. The body." True this is, though so strange. Sam stood at the doorway for several minutes just watching his brother's body breathe regularly, chest rising and falling. It was so easy to convince himself, just for a moment, that Dean was only asleep.

"It's very medically interesting," Cas agrees. "A body does not age while being inhabited by a demon, and though it can sustain fatal injuries the demon can retain control and prevent anatomic shutdown. I suppose there is the question of whether that is voluntary or merely a subconscious process, though I would assume—"

"Cas," Sam deadpans.

Cas snaps his mouth shut, and after a moment of thought opens it again. "I really don't know whether Dean's body will be maintained if we leave it, but I believe I can use my grace to remove all doubt."

Sam raises an eyebrow. "Your grace can be used to do that?"

"There are many things my grace can be used to do. I can think of no reason why this wouldn't be one of them."

"I thought you'd _lost_ your grace?"

The angel grimaces. "I have it back. In some form. It's likely only a temporary fix, but for now we don't have to worry about it."

Sam's silent for a moment, turning it over in his mind. He really can't think of a reason why Dean's body would die and start to rot, since it's already survived the first few hours without mishap. And Cas needs to conserve his energy.

But he would never forgive himself if inaction on his part meant that, somewhere down the road, Dean is unable to become himself again.

He nods, and gestures towards the stairs. "All right. Do it."

They ascend, Sam following shortly behind Cas, and soon stop by Dean's room, which Sam has locked from the inside. He inserts the key into the lock, twists, and pulls the door open.

Cas steps gingerly over the warding in case it's still drying, and for a moment just stands still, staring down at the apparently sleeping form of the man he once pulled from the depths of hell.

Dean was _so scared_ then of what he would become when his year was up and his side of the bargain came due.

His biggest fear has always been, without a doubt, failing in his role as Sam's protector. For the most part, Sam was appropriately grateful for it, but sometimes it just pissed him off. He was an adult and Dean had his own issues to worry about. But coming up in second place was fear of his own future. He has never been able to see himself as the hero he is. He has never had enough faith in his own goodness.

And now, suddenly, everything he's ever wrongfully believed about himself has, completely outside of his control, come true.

Sam rubs roughly at his dry eyes and says, "Just do it, Cas."

Cas obeys, reaching his hand, fingers stretched wide, over Dean's steadily rising chest. He lowers it until his palm is so close Sam might not be sure whether it were touching down against the body if he couldn't see the slight unsteadiness that persists in Cas's arm, and then a soft blue light begins to spread from Dean's heart. It rushes along his extremities, illuminating every blood vessel even through his clothes, to the point that the body looks like some grotesque Halloween decoration. Sam notes, though, that the light stops just an inch or two short of the Mark, weaving around it and creating a significant gap in the illumination of Dean's veins where that godforsaken thing blemishes his skin. For the briefest moment, the body's breathing hitches, and Sam feels his heart stop beating.

Then Cas withdraws his hand, the air begins entering and exiting Dean's lungs normally once again, and the blue light dies. The entire process lasted about five seconds.

Cas turns to Sam, breathing hard. "That will last it a while, at least. You won't have to feed it or give it drink; the grace will sustain it."

"Cas," Sam says, watching the angel with his brows drawn in concern, "you sure you had the juice for that?"

"I'll be fine," he wheezes, and pauses to draw in a slow, deep inhale. When he continues he seems steadier. "I just need rest. This will save you a lot of trouble."

He starts towards the door, and Sam starts to follow, but stops to cast one final glance at his brother's empty body. His gaze lingers on the Mark, and in a fraction of a second he realizes it's eliciting more energy-expending hatred and bitterness than he can afford right now. He looks back towards the door, where Cas is standing, watching him watch the Mark with the same sad gaze he's always had.

"Maybe," Sam ventures, pretty sure their minds are on the same track, "since he's separated from the Mark itself, physically at least, its hold on him will… lose some of its potency."

Cas won't humor him. Not that he really wants him to. He shakes his head without hesitating, and says, "The Mark is what made Dean a demon. Surely it will stay with him for at least as long as he remains that way."

Sam frowns, rubbing the back of his head. "You don't think it'll… like, manifest on the arm of anyone he…" He trails off, unable to complete the thought.

Cas, of course, understands. "Doubtful. The physical mark means nothing, really. I mean, it's extremely significant symbolically, but not as far as how it affects him. It goes far deeper than that—it's something that cleaves to his very soul. He will carry it with him wherever he goes, even if it will no longer be visible."

"Guess it would be too easy if all we had to do was look for poor insane saps with the friggin' Mark of Cain on their arm," Sam mutters.

"Far too easy," Cas agrees. He's silent for a moment. Then, "What is your next move, Sam?"

Sam allows for another pause. He has to. "Honestly? I'm fried. I can't think. The next step is, of course, to find Dean, but that's gonna entail a lot of individual stages that I can't think through right now. My next move is to force myself to get some rest. After that… research. See if there's any way I can…" The pause before the next word is minute, but definite. "…summon him. That's really as far ahead as I can think at the moment."

Cas nods, eyes narrowed in deep contemplation. "And what do you think Dean's next move will be?"

Sam runs a hand down his face. "After finding a body? Getting the Blade back. Though that's gonna be really difficult and he knows it. I guess he'll try to find Crowley, or work on gathering allies, or maybe try to do some research into how to get around the warding or try to set up a trap for me… I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine." He eyes Cas. "What's _your_ next move?"

Cas manages to suppress his weary sigh, but he's extremely obvious about it. "My… comrade very much wants me to come with her to help sort out heaven. Frankly, though, she doesn't truly need my assistance. She wants it more because she believes it will be good for me, with which I disagree. So…" He pauses, and inhales sharply. "I'm not needed elsewhere. I'm going to stay, help any way I can."

Sam stares at the angel, mind going blank, one corner of his mouth curving upwards. "You sure?"

"Absolutely. There is nowhere I would be but here. Why don't you head to your room?" Cas takes the single step to bring him outside the door and gestures down the hall. "I don't have your research experience or aptitude, but I can at least get you a head start."

Some of the weight is gradually shaking its feathers and flying from Sam's shoulders. He won't have to do this alone. A grin flickers across his lips, a real one, the first he's produced in a very long time. "I'm really glad you're here, Cas."

Cas offers a smile back—a little more forced than his own, but still genuine. "Under the circumstances I can't really say I'm 'glad' as well, but I am happy to help. I only hope… I can."

Sam does too, of course he does, but just knowing that he'll have a friend in all this is enough that he thinks he might actually be able to fall asleep. He lets the smile drop from his face after he locks the door and starts down the hallway, but his steps are definitely a little bit lighter.


	3. Absence

Remembering his brother's expression and mannerisms when he killed Magnus, his wild, unrestrained blood frenzy as he killed Abaddon, Sam expects Dean to make some kind of move towards reclaiming the First Blade to facilitate that euphoria again within the first week.

Seven days pass without so much as a knock at the door or a peep from Crowley. Sam catches wind of two possible cases in that time, and contacts nearby hunters to ask them to check things out. Everything is very quiet. Cas is a pretty inefficient researcher but it is, to be perfectly honest, tremendously helpful to have somebody else present just to get Sam out of his own head every now and then.

By the end of the first week Sam is going stir crazy. They haven't found anything useful. The tomes Sam has dug up on demon summoning have pretty consistently held that you have to know a specific demon's ritual in order to summon it but have been frustratingly vague regarding how such a thing is actually developed. He figures even if he could summon Dean, he wouldn't come to him willingly. He said it himself—he wants to put as much distance between them as possible. But Sam realizes he was counting on Dean being desperate to reclaim the Blade.

He has to have extrapolated that Sam gave the Blade to Crowley, and Sam suspects he knows that going straight to the King and demanding he disclose the weapon's location isn't the wisest course of action. Still, he thought Crowley might have caught wind of… something. And if he does, it would follow his usual routine to come crying to Sam about it.

Dean's body remains in his room, and Sam checks it every day, but its condition never changes. And now, angel warding has been added to the markings scribbled on the floor and the door of the room—by Cas's specific request. In his words, "There is really no reason I should need access to anything in that room, and most angels hate Dean. If they could, they would destroy his body; I am certain of that. Any steps we can take to make that difficult for them, we should."

By day eight Sam is desperate enough to call up Crowley. As expected, the King of Hell did not previously know that Dean is out in the wind and is not pleased to hear it, and Sam listens to him splutter and curse angrily for a full ten seconds before he composes himself enough to ask, "What is it that you need?"

"Any info you've got on a way to summon Dean," Sam responds readily and intensely.

"That's gonna take quite a lot of time. And you know those things aren't perfunctory, right? He'll feel the tug, but if he doesn't want to come to you, he won't."

Sam grits his teeth. "You got any better ideas?"

Silence on the other end. A silence that Sam doesn't like—a silence full of truths unspoken. Then, "I'll poke around. Keep in touch; I get so lonely when I don't hear from you, sweetheart. If I didn't know any better I'd think you were using me."

Crowley hangs up, and Sam sits there blinking for a moment before he rolls his eyes.

It's two weeks later that Cas finally convinces him to leave the bunker. He's found a potential case less than an hour away, and it's obvious he's pretty proud of this accomplishment—as he should be. Sam's impressed, to be honest. It's a pretty straightforward one, as it turns out—vengeful spirit—but it does feel good to be out and about, actually doing something useful. Not as good as Sam might have hoped, because there's always that voice in the back of his mind reminding him every second he's being useless to Dean, but he's able to stifle it at least for a little while. Cas even gets him to swing by the grocery store on the way back, and that night they have a small barbecue rather than eating dinner out of the microwave like Sam has been defaulting to every time he realizes he's too hungry to focus.

Crowley calls during the afternoon three days later claiming to have found a spell that will locate Dean. He texts Sam with an address, and an hour or so in the Impala later, Sam and Cas arrive at a five star hotel. Naturally, their destination is the penthouse.

"I don't like this," mutters Cas under his breath as they wait for a response to Sam's knock at the door.

"I never like this," Sam mutters right back, referring broadly to the general situation of working, in any way, with Crowley. "But I'm kind of even more out of options than I've been in the past."

The door opens wide, and there stands the King of Hell, dressed all in black, looking exactly the same as he always does. "Moose. And Not Moose Version 2. How nice of you to drop by." He turns and walks back into the enormous area he's presumably stolen from some poor sap, leaving his guests to close the door and follow. Sam steps inside first, his eyes performing a quick sweep of the area. The walls are mostly glass, affording a beautiful view of the city as the sun begins bleeding out over the sky in its steady descent towards the horizon. The furniture is spotless, the wood floors polished to perfection. Sam's eyes come to a stop on the body lying in a puddle of blood in the kitchen to the left.

"Abaddon sympathizer," Crowley briefly explains as Cas shuts the door. "Though he had splendid taste."

Sam shakes his head, dismissing it. "All right, this spell. What does it entail?"

Crowley heaves a dramatic sigh. "Never had any interest in foreplay, did you, Moose?" He heads towards the kitchen area, stepping carelessly over the dead man's head on his journey to the table. Sam and Cas follow, avoiding the body entirely.

Spread out over the table is a map of the United States, and next to it, a large bowl of exceedingly suspicious-looking liquid. "Took a little while to get a hold of this spell," Crowley comments, though there's something unsaid in his voice that Sam's not sure he likes. "Here's how it works, and try to follow along: I pour, map burns, you go to whatever's left. Got it?"

Sam blinks, not sure he does, but he throws out his hand in a gesture that says _go ahead_. "Just do it."

Crowley's eyes widen in feigned exasperation, and he picks up the bowl, turning it carefully sideways so the strange greenish fluid covers most of the map and hardly spills over to ruin the table, though it definitely will leave some spots, at the very least. Once that's done he sets the empty bowl on the counter behind him, pulls out a matchbox, removes and strikes a single match, and tosses it down to the middle of the huge stain on the map.

The paper ignites easily, but curiously, the fire spreads out to the edges before it starts destroying it. Sam watches in fascination as from there, the flames eat away at the map, centralizing on two states: North Dakota and Kentucky. Two sparks land in them—the north and smack in the middle, respectively—further specifying the locations.

"Two different places?" Cas says, a knot formed between his brows.

"Impressive that you can count that high, Feathers," Crowley observes. "All right, here's the deal: this is a location spell for the Mark of Cain. I was a bit concerned that it would just latch on the actual Mark, which is, according to what you told me, still on the arm of the original body of your black-eyed brother-slash-compatriot, but fortunately it doesn't seem to have gone that way. It's given us two locations because there are now two Marks. When Cain gave it to Dean, he wasn't moving it; he was, essentially, copying it."

"So one of these is actually Cain," Sam murmurs. "And we don't know which."

Crowley nods. "I also want to emphasize the importance of haste; these are their locations _right now_ ; by the time you get there, they could be gone. It doesn't help that Dean knows this spell exists."

Despite what he's just said, Sam doesn't move as he just stares at the demon, eyes narrowed. "This is what you used to find Cain when he first got the Mark. Isn't it?"

Crowley shrugs, and holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "You caught me. Yes, I knew about this when you first called. But I didn't have it at the ready. Needed to go back to the home of the woman who gave it to us, dig around there, then actually find the ingredients, which was something of a hassle on its own, not to mention some personal issues that have come up recently—nothing you need to concern your pretty, shaggy head over. Just go, find him, and take care of it. And bring these with you—when you're getting close to the Mark, they'll let you know."

Sam snatches up the two pieces of burnt paper and places them gingerly into his breast pocket. He casts a sidelong glance at Crowley. "You won't be investigating this?"

"Hell no. It's a fifty-fifty shot. Dean Winchester or the Father of Murder. I have no reason to want to be within a mile of either of them."

So Crowley's afraid of Cain, Sam notes. Trying to hide it for obvious reasons, but something interesting that may be useful later. Though probably not.

"We may need this spell again," Cas says, shaking Sam out of the tangential thought.

"Don't fret about that. I've enough extra portions of the ingredients to do it again fifty times over. You fail this time—and you'd better not—just give me a ring."

They have to be fast. There's hardly any time to formulate a plan—something they desperately need. They have two destinations and have to operate under the assumption that they have no time at all to get to either. And then there's the other can of worms that is the mess of practical complications that come with somebody's extremely skilled hunter of a brother being turned into an incredibly powerful demon.

Sam nods to Cas, and they both head back the way they came in.

"You're welcome," comes Crowley's obnoxiously indignant voice shortly before the door closes behind them.


	4. Empty

Sam's eyeballing the burnt pieces of paper, pulling up maps on his phone, and punching the numbers all the way down the elevator and out the door. Cas is silent, letting him focus. At the Impala reenters their line of sight, Sam announces, "It's looking like the two locations are Minot, North Dakota and Bradfordsville, Kentucky. Or someplace very near them."

Cas hesitates; then, "Are we splitting up?"

Sam casts a glance at him that broadcasts whatever remains of alarm when you subtract the surprise, and he looks back at his phone. Instead of directly answering, he continues, "We are, at this moment, almost three hours closer to Minot than to Bradfordsville. Minot's a fairly sizeable city, population of about 45,000. Bradfordsville's tiny. Barely 300 people. And honestly, I'm not sure this little fleck is directly on it." He pulls out the map of Kentucky and holds it sideways, examining it. "Might be a bit to the east. Hard to tell really. Point is, there aren't a lot of big cities in the area."

"Would that perhaps be a more ideal spot for Cain, based on what Dean told us about the last place he was living?" Cas ventures, uncertain. "I mean, it's harder to maintain a low profile in such a small town, but if he might actually be _outside_ the town…"

"Exactly. And based on what Crowley told me over the phone, Dean's biggest mission right now is just to find places he can get totally hammered, play pool, and start bar fights. Not a lot of prospects for that in a town of three hundred." Sam shoves his phone into his pocket without turning it off and withdraws the keys to the Impala, obviously struggling to juggle everything with his injured arm. As he unlocks the doors and pulls open that of the driver, he says, "I don't like the idea of splitting up. Whatever we end up finding, we're gonna need backup. But the fact that Crowley has the means to easily set up this spell as many times as we need it is, to be honest, a huge advantage and comfort. And especially if Dean has no master plan he's working on right now, I'm way more uncomfortable with splitting up than I am with just taking a risk and maybe wasting twenty hours of driving." To punctuate his speech, he turns the keys in the ignition.

Cas is silent for a moment, processing his logic. He seems to deem it sound, and nods. "All right then. Minot, here we come."

* * *

They stop once near the Nebraska-South Dakota border for gas. Sam charges Cas with refueling while he makes a pit stop and a run into the convenience store for snacks and a ready-made salad and sandwich. They have over nine hours left in the car, and on the chance that they actually find exactly what they're looking for, Sam needs to have some energy.

He asks Cas to take over driving after that, grateful that the angel now has some experience behind the wheel, and uses the freedom of his hands to safely partake in the gas station food and read up on recent Minot news. There've been a few murders in the last week, but none of the reports note anything particularly supernatural. Sam makes some calls, introducing himself as Agent Tull following up on a tip that a dangerous criminal may be hiding out in the area. He skirts around the physical description by saying that the culprit's face has never been seen, nor indeed has his race been identified, but most accounts describe him as rather muscular and tall. He's spitballing, really. He has no idea what kind of person Dean might be wearing, but he strongly suspects he'd at least choose somebody who's physically fit.

He's worn out after an hour of phone conversations and tries to get some shut eye. He even succeeds for about ten minutes, but wakes up again for unknown reasons and can't go back to sleep.

With so much time on the road, he and Cas have opportunity to talk like they haven't had at all in the past two and a half weeks. Sam has no idea how to fill the silence. Finally, Cas asks, "Do we have anything resembling a plan?"

Sam blinks. "Use the map of North Dakota, follow whatever it is Crowley meant that he said we'd recognize that will get us close to the Mark. If it's Cain, withdraw. If it's Dean, immobilize him, bring him back to the bunker, complete the cure." He nods once, decisively.

"If it's neither? Or it is Dean, and we fail? Will we immediately go back to Crowley?"

Sam is silent.

"Sam, that's an outline of a plan, sure. Good start. But we need more."

He releases a long sigh. "You're right. You're right." He rubs one hand down his face, painfully aware that Cas is counting on him for almost the entirety of that plan. They both know Dean, but it's not Dean they're dealing with here. They can't approach this as a brother, or a friend. This is a hunting job.

"No chance at all of him being cooperative, I gather?" Cas ventures.

Sam looks over at him, blinking. Slowly he realizes that Cas, indeed, never had any contact with the demonized version of Dean beyond the precious few seconds he trapped him in his arms before he smoked out. And Sam hasn't said a word to Cas about what happened between them since then.

He does not want to talk about this, or indeed think about it. That wasn't Dean who hurled all those cruel words at him; Sam was ready to forget their short, heated conversations entirely, as merely the twisted products of a tormented soul that would be healed soon.

But that was when there was an end in sight. It's sprung far ahead of them now, at least far enough that they can't see where it is, and can only stumble almost blindly along a dimly lit trail in the hopes that they find it. And Cas ought to know what Sam has already put behind him on that trail.

"No," he finally says, in answer to Cas's question. "No, I don't think so."

Cas heaves a shallow, controlled sigh.

"I keep trying to tell myself it wasn't him, Cas," Sam whispers, and that sure catches the angel's attention, enough that it's evident to Sam even through his peripherals. "That he was… 'in there somewhere,' but the guy I was talking to wasn't Dean. But…" He breathes in deep, wipes at his eyes once, despite their being bone dry. "But I looked into his eyes. I heard the way he talked to me. It _was_ Dean, just a little angrier… well, a lot angrier… and sans filter. It's like all the Mark really did to him was remove the dam he's been building up for his entire life and… and there was so much _crap_ behind that dam that he got swept along with it. He's glad it's gone; it's a relief. And I can't fault him for it. I've been wanting him to stop construction for a long time." A sardonic chuckle rises from him. "I just… always pictured it going somewhat differently."

"Sam." Cas sounds extremely grave. Worried. But not about Dean this time. "Listen to yourself. You really think Dean, your brother, still being himself, would try to kill you with a hammer?"

He throws up a hand submissively. "No, of course not. I don't mean… Sure. I guess I didn't put that into words so well. Of course it did more to him than that, but… but if I try saying he's a different guy it's like I'm trying to invalidate everything he said to me. When in reality, he was just voicing the grievances he'd always really had because he could finally let himself. They were real. I can't pretend they weren't." He feels like he was going to keep talking, but the micro-pause after these words suddenly gets an extension when he feels Cas's curiosity—more than that, his _need to know_ —burning up the air between them.

He gives it a couple seconds, pulling his scattered thoughts together. He's about ready to talk when Cas finally gives in and asks, "What did he say?"

Sam makes another rough swipe at his eyes, his nose starting to prickle. "I… I think the Mark opened a lot of old wounds for him. Really went far back. He… He talked about our parents. Said that our Dad 'brainwashed' us, that it's… that it's my fault he grew up without a mother. And that last part is true at least, but—"

"Sam. No, it isn't."

Sam ignores him, and presses on: "But he—the real Dean, the human Dean, the silent sufferer, whatever the hell you want to call the version of him that he was before he died—he never would have said it before. Now that he's letting himself, am I supposed to ignore it? Just shrug and say 'Demons lie' and go on?"

"Sam—"

"Demons lie, yeah, and he's a demon, but he's also _Dean_ , and—"

"Sam," Cas cuts him off forcefully, "you are asking questions that neither of us can answer. Your brother has become something that has only one precedent since the dawn of time and all we can do is speculate. We can't waste energy asking questions like this. Let's just establish this: he is Dean, he is a demon, and we can't trust a thing he says while he's like this, so we're going to change him back and ask him direct."

His eyes, locked on Sam, who can only stare back, glow a soft blue as he speaks, and the quiet certainty burning in his voice finds its way into Sam's heart and spreads from his chest throughout his entire body. And he's not sure if it's an angel thing, or if he just knew in this instance exactly what to say and how to say it, or if the conviction he seems to hold of their imminent success is genuine and infectious, but after that, Sam breathes a little easier.


	5. Evasion

**AN** : _Another thing I failed to remember about the first couple episodes of season 10—the Black Spur, where Dean and Crowley were hanging out at the time, was also in North Dakota. Beulah. Less than two hours from Minot. Just wanted to assure you that's merely a bizarre coincidence. I'm not trying to hint at anything with that choice of location._

* * *

The news stories start appearing about two hours before their arrival in Minot. Sam watches in horror as they pile up, speaking of an impossibly strong man who killed three people outside a night club in horrifyingly gruesome ways and left the smell of sulfur behind him. Seems he vanished afterwards—both a good and a bad thing. He'll probably be long gone by the time they arrive, but this could mean he's not just body hopping; he might be riding the same guy around, so they could finally get a physical description.

Around the time buildings are starting to pop up around them, the cutout of the state which rests on Sam's lap begins to smolder. They purposely head for the night club mentioned in the news articles, and the nearer they get, the more the edges curl and detach from the piece of the map, floating straight up into the air until they disintegrate in tiny puffs of smoke. By the time they stop in the nearest parking lot, the thing is burning so hot it makes no logical sense that it, just a flimsy piece of paper, should even still exist, and as they make their way as surreptitiously as possible around the police tape, it abruptly dissolves into a small pile of ash.

No doubt left in their minds, they arrive, all suited up, at the Minot police station. But before they step out of the car, Sam turns to Cas and says, "I'll deal with this. You call Crowley."

Cas pauses just a fraction of a second too long, so Sam continues, "We should gather info while we're here but he can't be more than about two hours away. Assuming he stays at least that long at his next location, we can catch him, easily. Call Crowley. Tell him to come _now_."

Cas blinks at him, but he nods, and pull his phone out. Sam leaves him to it, and enters the police station. After flashing his badge he gets the report on the bodies—three of them, all males between thirty-one and forty-two, all of them badly cut up with the broken shard of a bottle, two bearing slashes to the throat, the other with the shard wedged into his chest. There were two witnesses, a young couple who saw pretty much everything. The guy is currently being questioned, so Sam sits the girl down in an interrogation room.

"Agent Tull, FBI," Sam says. "What's your name?"

"Angie," says the young woman, running a hand nervously through her dark hair.

"All right, Angie. Could you describe the assailant?"

She looks at him uncertainly, and then comes the usual protest: "I've already been through all this with the police—"

"I'm not the police," Sam cuts her off, less patience than usual in his voice. "Standard procedure, and it won't take too much of your precious time. Please bear with me. Now, the assailant?"

She looks chastised, and glances at her lap before looking back up. "Um, tall. Really tall, like six-four, maybe. Pretty built, too. Uh, white. Pretty pale, actually. Short brown hair. I didn't catch his eye color—my fiancé said they were brown too, but honestly I don't see how he possibly could have seen that."

"Okay, good," he says as he scrawls the last couple words down. "Now, can you tell me what happened?"

Angie gulps, and immediately starts fidgeting with her engagement ring. Sam waits. "We were about to leave," she starts. "We were sitting in our car across the street, in perfect view of the alley. They… they came out through the side, and… I mean, this guy, he was just _dragging_ these two grown men by the hair. They were screaming. I don't know if you've talked to the other girl who was inside, the bartender, but she said they started picking on him… Pretty stupid move if you ask me, he was _massive_ , but maybe he was sitting down and they couldn't tell? I don't know. But she said they didn't even say anything that bad, they were just a little drunk and being obnoxious, but this guy just dragged them outside, and then he…" She falls abruptly silent.

Sam knows where this is going. He never wanted his brother to be the subject of a conversation like this, but he _knows_ where this is going, and he _has_ to hear the rest. "Whatever it was, just tell me what you saw. I've been tailing this guy for weeks now, and trust me, whatever you say can't sound more insane than what I've already heard."

She looks at him in surprise. "Really?"

He nods. "Weird crap follows this guy." Examples would be good, he supposes. Preferably examples that are probably crazier than whatever she actually saw. "Bright lights, amazing strength, spontaneous fires, the smell of sulfur… One of his victims even cut his own—well that's technically classified. But suffice it to say, I've heard it all."

She looks excited now. "I wasn't actually on the scene at any point but I heard police talking about finding sulfur there."

Again he nods, and leans in closer. "Please. Tell me what you saw."

She's decided she will, that much is obvious. And the moment he realizes this, he's suddenly not sure he wants to know.

"He threw them against the wall," she says. "And when I say throw, I'm talking like… like a pair of footballs. They both hit the wall about ten feet up it and then just fell and stayed where they were. They could have already been dead, for all we knew. I guess he saw one of them moving, or maybe he didn't, but then he started kicking them, just brutally kicking them. We started dialing the police then. That was when another guy came out… and…" She bites her lip. "And the attacker, he… I don't know, he just reached out, and… and this man was pinned against the side of the building. His feet like two feet off the ground. This guy didn't even touch him. And he just kept beating the guys on the ground. He grabbed something off the ground after a minute or so and jammed it into their throats." She gets more upset the longer she speaks. Sam unconsciously leans even further forward, willing her to continue. After a moment to compose herself, she goes on, tears trembling in her eyes, "Surely they were dead after that, but he didn't stop."

An image flashes through Sam's head, an image he's been trying to put out of his mind since the moment it stopped happening—of Dean as he killed Abaddon, and then carried on thrusting the Blade into every yet unblemished part of her face and chest, his arm working tirelessly, ears deaf to Sam's shouts, mind obviously a world away.

He drags his attention back to Angie as she continues, "He turned, and this man, who was still pressed against the wall and apparently totally unable to move, he just… he just started _cutting_ him. We could hear him screaming. It felt like way longer than it should have been, because nobody came to investigate, but I… He just went nice and slow, at times just standing back to _watch_ him, and I have no doubt he was enjoying it." She shudders, gripping her hair in her fists. "Basically… he stopped when he heard the sirens, and the guy fell to the ground without even being touched, and he just jammed his fist and whatever he was holding into the guy's chest. But I am _sure_ he would have gone on as long as he could.

"He stepped out into the streetlight then. That was when we got a pretty good look at him. And I swear, he saw us. He looked right at us. I thought for sure we were going to die. But he just stared at us for a couple seconds, and then just turned and ran off down the street."

She stops, and roughly rubs her eyes, which are definitely producing tears even though she's managed to keep from full-on crying so far. But Sam doesn't have the presence of mind to be impressed by that right now.

Dean doesn't even exist anymore. Not if what he's hearing is to be believed.

He thanks Angie for her time, trying not to let his voice shake, not that it matters much if it does. He finds Cas on his way to the door, talking to an officer, and they head out side by side.

"So," Cas mutters as they step outside, "that's at least three people brutally murdered by a monster we failed to stop."

His earlier words _He's not your brother, at least not now; you have to be prepared_ flash through Sam's mind.

"Sam, if we find ourselves in a situation where the choice is between killing him or letting him go, we have to kill him. We need to establish that. So there's no question in the moment."

The words _You know I can't agree to that_ waver and die on Sam's tongue. Because Cas is right. This happened because they failed. Those men are dead because Sam is dangerously dependent on his brother, because he couldn't bear the thought of losing him, let alone being the one to kill him.

He probably just needs to accept that he's not a good guy. That in some very real sense, he's on a demon's side here. Because he knew, back in the bunker, as he held a knife to Dean's throat, that if he let him go, he would kill again. Nothing has changed.

He's just weak to the point of evil. That's the fact of the matter.

He doesn't respond to Cas. He just walks on ahead and gets into the driver's seat of the Impala. When Cas joins him in the shotgun seat, he asks with the picture of composure, "What did Crowley say?"

Cas sighs softly next to him, but he replies with an address.

* * *

It's a grungy motel this time, but at least it's close. The spell points them to the same part of Kentucky as well as a new location, just inside the Montana border. Sam immediately grabs the keys, but Crowley stops him, saying, "Hold your horses, Moose. He could still be on the road. Tell you what: I'll give you a couple gallons of this stuff and some large maps of the States, for your convenience. You run out, just call me, and we'll discuss your failures and see about getting you some more."

They load it into the trunk and drive nearly two and a half hours before reaching the little map of Montana burns into dust, and sure enough, they're in the middle of the highway when it happens. They stop on the shoulder of a back road and spread a map over the hood of the car.

As far as Sam can tell, the newest fleck lands on Miles City, just over two hours away.

They get there in about an hour and a half.

This time they don't know what specific location they're looking for. No news stories have popped up. It's a bit after midnight now, though, and the behavioral patterns of the demonized version of Dean haven't been too hard to pick up on. Sam has Cas pull up a list of the city's top bars and taverns, and they start from number one and go down.

On the way to number two, the map begins to glow and crumble.

Sam puts the vehicle in park, turns the engine off, and is stepping onto the concrete outside the driver's seat in a matter of seconds. He's sick of sitting and there's no time to waste. He notes, however, that Cas is still seated.

He leans down. The angel's gaze is trained on the brick wall ahead of them. The map in his hands is barely holding onto its existence. "Cas," he prompts.

Cas blinks, and turns his head to look at him. "He's here, Sam," he says, voice low and rife with apprehension. "He's here."


	6. Distance

_Three weeks ago_

If anyone had had the misfortune to just stumble across the area where the Lebanon Men of Letters bunker was situated, and to be near enough on the wrong day at the wrong time, they would have seen a large cloud of black smoke billowing gracelessly across the sky. If they hadn't been looking up, they still might rub their arms in discomfort, feeling, in a way they likely never had before, something wrong. It was evil in its purest form—a complete absence of good. This demon was different from most in that it had not yet partaken in many acts of evil at this point in its existence, but still they would have been thoroughly unsettled by the sensation of a complete vacuum where something endlessly good _should_ have been.

As it happened, the nearest man to the bunker at this time was a thirtysomething Asian American IT worker called Robert Li. He was about five foot nine with more than a little pudge, but enjoyed frequent nature walks, which as it happened was what he was doing on this particular day and in this particular place.

Dean Winchester, of course, had never done this before. He didn't even know how he'd known what to do. He'd just let his brand new instincts take over, and just like that he'd torn himself out of his body, stumbled his way around the building he knew so well but looked so different through whatever the hell senses he had as a freaking cloud of smoke, and bust out into the open air, hopefully for the last time. All he knew for sure as he tried to navigate through the outside world, barreling through the sky faster than he wanted to be, like running down a hill and being afraid with every step of tripping and falling headlong down the remainder until coming to a total stop as a mass of broken bones at the bottom, was that he _needed_ to find a body. Pronto.

So when he passed over a portion of the woods several miles out that contained a nature walk and happened to glimpse poor Robert Li taking a respite on a bench and typing out a text, he doubled back, diving down from the sky like lightning, and shoved himself in through the man's mouth.

It almost felt like falling. He found himself filling up Robert's furthest extremities first, his toes and his fingertips, and he could feel them twitching involuntarily before the tail end of his gaseous form had threaded itself between the man's lips. He felt the man's heart pounding in his chest just as his mouth snapped shut, and he blinked, feeling himself infiltrate Robert's blood and run through his veins like quicksilver, feeling the Mark burn the edges of the man's soul as he was shoved deep, deep into his own subconscious in a way that would take a very long time to heal.

He immediately flexed his stolen fingers, springing to his stolen feet. The phone was discarded on the ground; he'd take a look at that in due time. He rubbed his hands up and down Robert's face, opening and closing his mouth, making use of the fullest extent of expressions he could manage, because it felt more than anything in need of being _broken in_. He kicked his feet (a size or two smaller than the ones he was used to), popped his fingers (one of which bore a simple engagement ring), ran his tongue along his teeth (nothing overtly wrong with them but _even they felt strange_ ), blinked his eyes repeatedly (damn, this guy was slightly nearsighted, everything had just vaguely fuzzy edges and Dean was _not_ prepared to deal with that), and patted his protruding belly (it felt so much more burdensome than he would have expected, he'd have to move on to a new body as soon as possible). He bent over (almost falling, the art of balancing was ever so slightly different in this form) and snatched up the man's phone, running his thumb across the screen just to make sure it didn't lock itself, as he shoved the other hand into the guy's pockets, searching for his wallet. A quick examination of his driver's license told him his name, his age, and most importantly, his address.

He did not want Sam finding him. If it was a choice between going home with his brother and being dragged to hell, he thought he'd take the latter option, because at least he knew he'd be able to crawl out of there eventually. If Sam got to him again and managed to successfully restrain him… then he'd have to go back to being his brother again. To… to all the crap he put up with on a daily basis because it was less painful than the idea of losing Sammy. He was finally able to see the forest for the trees like this, and the power the Mark of Cain lent him… Well, he wasn't about to let that go.

Immediately as the thought occurred to him, he rolled up Robert's sleeve to check his arm. The Mark was notably absent. Didn't matter; he could still feel it. It was still with him, beyond any shadow of a doubt. This was extraordinarily comforting, even more so than he'd have expected. Here, at last, was one thing he could count on.

He turned his attention back to Robert's phone, pulled up his map app, and started entering in his address.

* * *

He got turned around a few times trying to find the parking lot, and by extension Robert's car, but after he did it was just a short, simple drive to his house, which he found utterly packed with food. It kind of looked like he was preparing for a party in a few days. Well, an extra trip to the grocery store wouldn't kill him.

Dean ate. He played loud music (and had to hook up his speakers to friggin' YouTube; the only CDs Robert had were pop groups Dean had never heard of). He put Robert's phone on silent and later found that he had been called four times by a "Madeline"—hearts by her name like Robert was an infatuated teenager, so he could guess what that meant—which might also explain the doorbell ringing, which he had endeavored to drown out with Led Zeppelin. Figuring Robert didn't seem to mind such behavior, he ate until he was ready to enter a food coma, took a very long nap, and then woke up to get drunk off his ass. Robert, as it turned out, had quite the wine selection.

It was a night of indulgence, and the best part was that the King of Hell wasn't standing by harping on his life choices. He was mildly worried about Sam finding him, since he was in fact very geographically close, but this faded away almost completely sometime during the second bottle of wine.

Of course, as morning came, the pleasant buzz in the back of his head was starting to be replaced by an awful migraine, a significant portion of the massive amount of food he'd consumed made a reappearance, and everything fun about being drunk was fleeing away from him fast.

Time to leave this body, and find one better suited for partying.

He braced himself to face the challenge of navigating the world as a disembodied smoke cloud, before letting his demonic instincts overtake him entirely and pull him up and out through Robert's mouth. He left the man gasping on his living room floor, rose up through his chimney, and started his search.

He found a body suitable for his needs—namely, to get as far away as possible in as short a time as possible—only a few houses down. A guy about his age and height, and a decent build. It'd do.

He immediately threw on some clothes, found the guy's car keys, and put Lebanon in his rearview mirror. He didn't even know where he was going, and it felt _fantastic_. All he was looking for, at least in the short run, was another body to inhabit. With each change, all consequences of anything he'd done in the previous body dissipated.

He'd wanted to howl at the moon, and hell was he going to howl.

The gas gauge was looking pretty low just as he crossed the border into Colorado, so he stopped in the first small town he found, grabbed a bite to eat at a diner, and moved into a guy in his late forties who was just about to get into his car in the parking lot. His feet were immediately killing him but he wasn't picky, particularly since all he was going to do was drive.

He had to get as far away from Sam as possible before making any sort of scene, because he didn't know when he was going to have to make a scene. If he'd stayed near the bunker long enough for his constant _need_ to kill to overwhelm him, it was likely he'd lose control to the point that Sam would show up on the scene shortly after it happened. Even if he just rode one guy out of town and stayed wherever he ended up, Sam could use information on local disappearances, follow up when they came back, and look for suspicious activity and crimes of potentially paranormal nature in the towns they reported waking up in. No, the next time he killed had to be as far removed as he could make it.

As it turned out, it was three host bodies and almost a full day on the road before he couldn't take it anymore.


	7. Weakness

This host body was his favorite so far, probably because it was the closest to what he was used to. Tan skin, similar hair to Dean's old body, six foot one, over two hundred pounds of muscle. Single guy in his late twenties. Lived alone. Fridge and kitchen cabinets absolutely packed with alcohol.

But this body, though more comfortable to inhabit and easier to pilot than his previous ones, still felt… wrong. He was reminded of how it felt to try on a suit jacket at the store that was labeled as his size but was too tight around the shoulders or rode up his back or didn't have long enough sleeves. Just like the last four. This one was closer, the closest so far, to feeling like it was his, but it wasn't close enough.

He was tired of driving—not physically, because he wasn't carrying around physical symptoms of anything, but emotionally—so for almost two days, he dealt with it. He ate more conservatively—on the chance that he stayed in this body for a while, he wanted to keep it fit—but spent both nights at the nearest bar he could find after driving about an hour from his host's hometown. The first night he just got drunk quietly and minded his own business, but by the second, the itch was becoming unbearable.

He knew exactly what he was feeling. Normally some punk ass Abaddon zealot with a very stabbable face would have shown up by now, but he was now well aware the reason they had been so consistently privy to his location, and that reason had been neutralized. Crowley was no longer riding his ass about every little thing but he was also no longer sending him regular top-offs and sparing him the trouble of seeking them out. Here and now, he was itching to kill, and the more he thought about it, the more excited he got, because he would have to get creative. The euphoria provided by the Blade was unlike anything he'd ever experienced and sooner or later he had every intention of reclaiming it. But the guy he was riding now had no weapons at all in his house, and Dean had searched it from top to bottom. He was totally unarmed, and he was starting to wonder what it would actually be like to fulfill the threat he had delivered to Sam, and rip out somebody's throat with his teeth.

All he had to do was bump into somebody, start a brawl, stove some fool's head in, get out of sight, and smoke out. It would be so easy, and any potential nearby hunters would just skim over the story in the paper, if one appeared at all.

But for some reason, his gaze kept returning to the ladies' room door—behind which he knew was a young blonde woman, probably barely out of college—and the two large men who kept looking in the same place.

He'd noticed her shortly after he arrived. She'd been having a tearful and heated discussion with some guy her age, which had ended with him storming out the door and her fleeing to the bathroom with tears rolling down her cheeks. It seemed that otherwise she was alone. About twenty minutes had passed, it was definitely full dark outside, and Dean feared—suspected that she had lost her ride home when her date had left.

She was definitely beautiful, and very small. Much smaller than the two dudes who were keeping uncomfortably close tabs on the door.

He rubbed both hands down his face. This was exactly what Dean, the old Dean, the weak Dean would do. If he _had_ to kill, if he had no choice and no demons were presenting themselves, he would do everything within his power to select a victim, or victims, who had it coming.

 _Did you feel sorry for her?_ echoed Crowley's voice in his head, not for the first time.

Crowley was an obnoxious ass, but Dean was afraid that he was right. He couldn't keep wavering. He couldn't keep showing little Dean's old weaknesses, that self-sacrificing streak he nursed so lovingly, like anything about his identity really depended on it, like anybody else cared either way what kind of man he was. If he had to make a choice that all his future choices would naturally follow, he would forsake humanity in a heartbeat. He would stand by this with absolute certainty. So why was it that in specific situations, he still felt something very near what he would call empathy?

 _What are you? A demon? Maybe you're human._

He took another swig of whiskey, trying to rationalize all this to himself. If it looked like it was in self-defense, it was less likely to draw attention, right? It was what Dean would do, but wasn't it also just a logical choice to make? He wasn't sure he could overcome his bias. He wasn't sure what his motivations really were. He wasn't sure of much of anything.

All he knew was his hands were shaking, he couldn't focus, and he was so starved for the taste of blood that he was fooling himself into thinking he could smell it.

He got up, not bothering to pay, and retreated into the men's room, where he left his host lying on the floor. Being as subtle as he could manage, he slid under the doors and crossed the five feet of floor space between the restrooms. Sure enough, the girl was sitting on the toilet lid with a mess of used tissues on her lap, mascara streaming down her face, and her phone raised to her ear. Likely looking for a ride, though it didn't look like she was finding any success; if anything she looked _more_ upset than she'd been when Dean had noticed her.

Not letting himself decide how he felt about her emotional state, nor even letting himself believe he had reason to have any opinion at all on the matter, he rose up, and she saw him just in time to let out a terrified squeak before he silenced her by sliding in through her parted lips.

Immediately he was overcome by blubbering, because the hormones were firing in her brain and the tears were still coming and he reached up instinctively to rub at her eyes, but found some unexpected obstacles in her fingernails—they felt so _fragile_ , they were so long and clearly painted recently.

He'd hardly registered it before, but she was wearing a dress, and a fairly short one at that. Modest enough that, as far as he could tell, she didn't have to worry about pulling on it to cover everything when she changed position, but just barely. He sat there, resisting the urge to reach up and feel her chest, until he had to ask himself why he bothered to resist that urge at all, until he harshly reminded himself that he was doing this for a definite purpose, and shouldn't waste time.

He stood up, and immediately tripped, finding it impossible to right himself, and falling flat on the girl's face. Jeez, she had no upper body strength at _all_ —it was immediately apparent as he tried to break his fall, and as he turned the borrowed body over to examine the girl's shoes. Sure enough—heels. Open-toed heels. Super. He knew she hadn't been drinking at all but he was sure going to walk out of this bathroom like she had been.

He gathered up everything in the room that looked like it belonged to her (too much, there was too much crap, how did she cope?), shoved it unceremoniously into her purse (seriously, how did she do _anything_ with these nails?), checked her ID (her name was Rachel and she was only twenty-three), got distracted by her reflection in the mirror only briefly (okay, for a couple minutes straight, so sue him, she was _hot_ ), and exited the room, walking with as much dignity as he could.

The moment he stepped outside, he missed his own body more than he had since he'd left it. Everything was so _huge_. Every single person that he could see towered over this poor woman.

A thought flashed in the back of his mind of perhaps purposely seeking out physically weak hosts. It could be an exercise in character-building.

He grimaced without realizing it, mentally smacking himself. Maybe later, when and if he started getting bored with eternity, he could try out crap like that. But right now, he didn't have everything he wanted. He had to reclaim what was his—the First Blade. Till then, he couldn't afford not being in top form.

As he slipped through the crowd, taking each step mindfully, he could see those two men out of the corner of his eye. They hadn't moved since he'd first noticed them, but now, they stood up, and started for the same door he was heading for.

 _Perfect_.

He stepped outside, and quickly scanned the area. The street was pretty deserted, no pedestrians in sight. No alleys nearby either. Everything was connected, with only two-lane streets separating each building. Nowhere to hide, really.

He picked a direction at random and started walking, and a few seconds later, he heard the door open not far behind him.

The good news was they were probably planning on following him until they were sure they had no witnesses—just what he wanted. And they almost definitely knew the area better than he did, so he'd leave the location of the slaughter up to their discretion.

He didn't have to walk too far before the little shops turned to large suburban homes—not exactly mansions, but it was clearly a well-off area. Very walkable though.

He almost caught himself thinking it seemed like a nice sort of place to live.

Just as this thought began its flight across his mind, the pair of rhythmic footfalls behind him started accelerating. Not too noticeable, to someone who wasn't looking for it. But this was it. They were making their move.

He stopped in his tracks and turned around, and jumped just the tiniest bit. They were closer than he had realized, perhaps two long strides away.

"One—" he started, but immediately snapped his mouth shut in shock at the high pitch of the voice that came out of it. Without thinking, he snarled at the thought that he probably appeared frightened because of this, and pushed on: "One warning: stay away from me. You're not gonna like what happens if you don't."

He wasn't sure why he said this, why he gave them a chance at all. What if they took it? He had to kill _somebody_.

Fortunately, and not at all surprisingly, though, they did not.

Now, based on the fact that the body he was inhabiting felt too weak and fragile to snap a toothpick, the _plan_ had been to transfer himself into one of these guys and then beat the other one to death from there. That was why it was so ideal that they came in a pair. But, as it turned out, in a time of immediate danger, in the heat of the moment, drawing his essence out through his own mouth still came less instinctively than throwing punches. Which was why, when one of the guys strode forward, reaching for him, rather than smoking the hell out of a fight he knew he couldn't win, he found himself ducking and thrusting a tightly clenched fist forward into the guy's abdomen.

The man, all six feet and two hundred fifty pounds of him, flew two yards back and landed on the sidewalk, his head connecting with the concrete with a sickening _crack_. He was already dead. Dean stood still, staring at the body, feeling the thrill, the utter _ecstasy_ of the kill spread through him, flooding through this poor girl's veins to every furthest corner of her body like a sudden cancer, but it had gone too fast, it wasn't _enough_.

He turned his head to the other man—who was still blinking dumbly at the body of his fellow—mind quickly registering that he was down one victim, but he didn't need to leave this body to get what he needed. His voice, the gravelly, masculine voice that was rightfully his, sounded in his own mind: " _You know, I got a hell of a lot more runnin' through me than just demon juice._ "

He glanced down at his host's arm, because it was shaking, and though the Mark was indeed absent, the orange glow that formed and spread under his skin was there just the same, forming a familiar shape a few inches below the crook of his elbow. It would be gone when the euphoria was. Fine with him. His eyes slipped from the light show under the skin of his arm to the tiny feet wobbling in those ridiculous shoes below him.

They were perfect. It would be nice and slow.

He tore the shoes off the girl's feet, and, a wild grin of unholy excitement curling her painted lips, he rushed towards his second would-be attacker, relishing the look of bewilderment and terror on his face just before he started screaming.


	8. Solo

He told himself it was probably best to keep his kills as mundane as possible. The more often he used these powers, the more utter bloodbaths he left in his wake, the more hunters he could have on his tail.

There was one problem.

It was so damn _fun_.

It wasn't like using the Blade. Nothing was. But nothing was like this either. He couldn't count on both hands how many times he'd been thrown against a wall by some telekinetic entity, and now, he was the one doing the throwing. He killed as often as he could, as flamboyantly as he could. And it never got old. But the higher his body count got, the more he wished somebody would, _could_ , put up a decent fight.

He was somewhere in Minnesota when he caught wind of a nearby demon, the first since he'd started hopping bodies. He was having a small brunch in a diner and reading the paper when he noticed an article about a young woman whose brother had been killed while they were walking home through their neighborhood, by a man whose eyes, as she was quoted, were "black as coal."

It looked to Dean like your classic fear-spreading small fry demon. Ah, memories. And he would have _loved_ to kill it, just like old times—though his reasons had changed, he was just as glad to off demons now. The problem was, he had lost any means of doing so. He and Sam had had plenty of connections, but from where he was standing now, demon-killing knives were _rare_. Totally unheard of in most circles.

Finding no reason to confront it, and finding himself very much behind the idea of promoting the proper and honestly pragmatic fear of this terrible world that demonic attacks were prone to spread, he elected to do nothing and get out of town.

He started thinking after that though—maybe he should start making an effort to be a little more discreet. It wasn't just Sam and Castiel he had to worry about—Crowley likely had standing orders to all his followers to report to him if they found evidence of Dean Winchester, and maybe he was even dispatching search teams. Yes, he should certainly keep avoiding fellow hell-spawn, and probably start putting a lid on his powers when ripping the life out of human beings.

But he started noticing demons on street corners. Just riding people around in a crowd, minding their own business. Some of them even saw him, despite his attempts to remain out of sight—seeing one another's real faces, they could pick each other out easily—but all he got from many was a nod, or a long stare, before going about their business. Some even quickly broke eye contact and strode on as fast as they could. One or two weren't doing anything urgent and weren't afraid to approach him and say hi. They introduced themselves by what he was pretty sure were their hosts' names—and then confirmed his suspicion that they had no idea who he was by asking, "What are you called?"

He did likewise. His current host, as he recalled after a couple seconds of trying to remember from his driver's license, was named Kaden.

It seemed there were more demons than he realized that were pretty much doing what he was doing—just doing their best to stay on Earth and under the radar, just trying to get by. Sure, they were still assholes at best and couldn't stay in one host and one place for too long without getting convicted of murder, but things really weren't like they had been before. With Azazel and Meg and Ruby and… everyone. There was no master plan anymore. Crowley had taken the throne, but he had no end goal in mind, no great generals, probably not even any devoted servants. If any demon was truly loyal to Crowley it was for personal gain.

Abaddon probably _would_ have been a far better ruler.

 _Too bad I butchered her_ , he thought, grinning.

Then there were the traditionalists, who had spent years in the same patterns of killing, who were dedicated to promoting terror, who were actively trying to further the kingdom of hell by dragging human souls into sinful habits. They were more common than Dean had ever realized, if one of the demons he talked to was to be believed. But the ones in this classification still weren't necessarily supporters of Crowley. Some of them were barely even aware that he was in power.

The crossroads demons were a different sort. They answered summons, collected souls, and did the work they'd always done, but the difference was that they reported back to their higher-ups. Not directly to the King himself, but Crowley did have access to that information, and they very much knew what was what in regards to the governing bodies of Hell. They were to be avoided. But they were always either in Hell or in the midst of a deal.

As the weeks went by, it seemed more and more that Dean had little to worry about in the area of being caught. He still needed to be careful, of course. Couldn't fall into serial killer habits to the point that somebody could piece together his patterns with newspaper clippings. In fact he couldn't get caught by hunters at all; they couldn't kill him, but they'd almost certainly exorcise him, sending him to hell and to Crowley, who would send him to Sam, who _would_ kill him. Or at least turn him. Not much of a difference there. So yeah, he'd have to do his best to avoid confrontations. But he didn't have to worry every time he went out in public about being recognized by some Crowley lackey.

He also realized one day that he'd become very comfortable riding around Kaden. He'd been in him for about a week now and it had started out just like all the others, but after the first few days he'd become very… familiar. Dean knew his range of motion, he was accustomed to the sound and timbre of his voice in his throat, he'd grown used to his height (six feet, five inches, almost—taller even than Sam, the thought of which always filled him with triumph). The way his fingers moved and the size of his feet were no longer nearly so strange and the extent of his speed and agility had been thoroughly scoped out.

He was a much more obviously formidable foe than that girl Rachel had been, but killing in this body felt just as good.

Around the ten-day mark, he was sitting in a bar, sipping beer, as he pondered how much longer he was planning on giving it before he moved on. And whether he even wanted to move on. Sooner or later he hoped to find a vessel that would work well enough for him that he could stay in it for years and become familiar enough that he could go for extended periods of time without remembering that it was not his own.

Maybe he should just stay like this while he could.

He was just starting to think the effects of the alcohol were kicking in when there were suddenly these two drunk bastards in his face, and one of them was the fugliest son of a bitch he'd ever seen while the other had a laugh to match his friend's face, so he counted backwards from ten, stood up, and dragged them both outside, where he made quick work of them before some other guy came out looking distressed. He didn't know whether he was another of their friends or just a concerned citizen or just at the wrong place at the wrong time, but he was there, and Dean wasn't satisfied yet.

It wasn't till the sirens started that Dean's brain slowed down enough for him to realize how far he'd gone. The third guy had done nothing to provoke him, sure. But more importantly, he'd used his abilities, in a big way, and had gotten too swept up in the rush of things to even realize he was doing it. At least he was in a back alley, he reasoned to himself as he stepped onto the street, and had no reason to suspect anyone had seen a thing…

His eyes fell on the two terrified faces peering out of the driver's window of a car twenty feet ahead of him.

He first thought that he'd probably have to flee this body. Unless he killed these two as well. It would be pretty quick work.

The woman's eyes shone with tears as she clung to the man, who wrapped his arm around her protectively even as his face betrayed the same terror.

The sirens were getting closer.

There was no time. It didn't matter anyway; he was still riding the massive adrenaline rush triggered by those three kills, and, fueled by this energy, he simply turned and sprinted down the street.

* * *

He secured a new vehicle the quick and dirty way, by threatening a man just stepping out of his car until he handed over his keys. He also demanded the guy's jacket, because he sure as hell looked conspicuous covered in enormous amounts of blood.

He drove until he found himself in a reasonable-sized town, and once there realized that he could still use a couple beers. He'd barely finished one before those guys started bugging him. In fact, he was pretty hungry too. Nobody would have to die this time; all he needed was to get at least a little drunk, have a little fun, and maybe get a hotel room with a total stranger, who knew.

There weren't a lot of options when he first walked in, so he just ordered a beer and a burger, which he enjoyed quietly. A couple very becoming blondes entered and took seats at the bar after about an hour, at which point he almost immediately approached and offered to buy them drinks. They declined—go figure—but were unable to resist his charm and soon fell into conversation with him. Par for the course, really.

The beer was quality, the ladies were obviously into him, and he was feeling pretty damn good on the whole when he looked up and suddenly noticed the trenchcoated man approaching him, sea-blue eyes trained on him with all the intensity of a holy fire and all the pain of the bitterest truth.

He thought of the first time he'd ever seen this man, how impassive his expression had been then, how casual and unafraid. The most intense emotion he'd shown had been curiosity, and nothing Dean did had been able to stop him. He had tried so hard to pretend he wasn't shaking in his boots.

Oh, how things had changed.

This was going to be interesting.


	9. Stranger

A brief perimeter check reveals to them that, thank goodness, there is only one way in and out of the bar. Working very quickly, desperate to finish before anybody tries to enter or exit, they lay a devil's trap outside the door.

Sam doesn't know if it'll even work. That's how Dean escaped. He said stepping over the markings had "smarted," so Sam's hope is that it will at least catch him by surprise and slow him down, but optimistically, that Dean is in a different body now means it will be completely effective.

He told Cas about the limited immunity Dean displayed back when he first asked what had happened—really, it was just about the only detail he _did_ give him—but neither of them has acknowledged this inconvenience aloud since. All Sam says after they finish up the markings is, "I hope this works."

Cas needs to go in, because he can tell who Dean is. At least assuming there's only one demon in the joint. They briefly debated on whether Sam should come with him or not; Dean would recognize either one of them, of course, and Sam didn't like the idea of sending Cas in alone one bit, but if he makes it out of the building there will be nobody outside to stop him. They don't exactly have time to rig traps at the entrance.

Sam is pretty sure they're in silent agreement that they may need to make a scene. Of course, they would prefer to make a scene outside where there are far fewer people, and he's pretty sure Dean would too. So they have that going for them.

In the end, they did decide to go in together. The plan they formed was flimsy, and as they step through the door Sam is more than a little uncomfortable with the uncertainty of it all, but this is the best they can do.

Cas enters first, Sam making an effort to hide behind him, and glances around quickly. Fortunately, or maybe not so much, it's pretty quiet—it's Tuesday, about to become Wednesday, so there isn't anybody getting sloppy drunk, though there's a reasonable number of people here just being responsible. Except one man: a long-limbed guy, pale as death with gray-blue eyes, having a burger and a beer at the bar area and apparently laughing at his own joke with two pretty women who look a little interested but mildly uncomfortable.

Sam is not at all surprised when Cas turns his head just enough to see him, mutters, "That's him," and then turns back to obviously face Mr. Comedian.

Following their weak excuse for a plan, Sam immediately ducks into the empty booth directly inside the door, tucked into the corner of the small bar. He won't be too visible here.

Cas is going to be the one to approach Dean. Sam already knows that his brother hates him, and he honestly thinks that if he tried just walking up to him now he wouldn't care that he's in a public place; he'd break his beer bottle over Sam's head and cut his body to ribbons. Sam could usually beat him in a fight before (okay, maybe not as often as he'd like to admit), but now, when he's one arm down and Dean has the Mark of Cain? He doesn't like the odds. But Cas—Dean's feelings towards Cas are still up in the air. With him, there's a chance, albeit a small one. And if he can just get close enough to Dean to knock him out, or drive him close enough to Sam that he can do likewise, they might be able to slap on some demon cuffs, load him up in the car, and get him back to the bunker.

During their drive here, after a certain long period of silence, Cas said, "Now that he's in a different body, we need to start considering exorcism."

Sam didn't say a word and gave no indication that he'd heard.

"We don't know _exactly_ how it works and what will happen to him, but if it comes to it, there are worse plans. He'll end up in hell, under Crowley's thumb, and Crowley will very likely send him to us—"

"I don't wanna risk that, Cas," Sam said softly. "You're right, and I've thought about this, but… we can't forget that Crowley is _not_ to be trusted. I'd be surprised, honestly, if he actually sent Dean back to us instead of just killing him. I mean, we've never known him to reliably take the most efficient and logical option, but in this case… we can't barter with Dean's life. I won't let him die."

"Dean can't die. He has the Mark."

Sam sighed. "Thought about that too. It's just… there always seems to be some new spell or ritual or creature that's an exception to every rule we think we know. And… and Crowley knows about the demon-curing ritual. Knows that we keep failing to contain Dean long enough to carry it out. So he might do it himself, and what then? Keep Dean locked up in hell forever?" He fell silent, unwilling to go any further describing that potential future.

Cas said nothing, obviously turning the words over in his head, not trying to argue with any of them, but he looked distinctly unhappy.

Sam knows that an exorcism would be so much easier. They could slip inside, staying hidden, and be halfway through the incantation before Dean even realizes something's wrong. But the chances of killing his brother, of actually destroying his soul or sending it God only knows where, especially when it's in this state, makes him feel sick. He's already established to himself that he will do _anything_ but kill Dean. He hates himself for it, but he can't change it any more than he can command the sun to rise or set.

So they'll just use this sloppy, idiotic plan of trying to get close enough to knock him out. If need be, there's been a cooler full of pouches of purified blood in the trunk of the Impala for three weeks now, so they can get started on the ritual while still on the road.

He realizes he's honestly not expecting them to get that far, to the point that he has no plan whatsoever on how they'll put him in his own body once they arrive. Better not think about it. Focus on the here and now.

Sam watches as Cas draws near, and he sees the moment the strange man at the bar notices. He sobers up immediately, laughter dying and smile dropping off his face. Immediately his gaze sweeps over the area, and Sam ducks his head down, pulling up a menu to block his face.

He feels the man's gaze linger on him, and he tries to breathe as calmly as he can.

Cas's voice is slightly muffled by distance and the muted din of the bar, but he hears it clearly enough: "By all logic, I know that you must be Dean Winchester. But I see nothing of Dean Winchester before me."

Sam peeks out above the menu, heart pounding, trying not to think about how _true_ that is. A wild notion flares up in his mind, that this is all a trick, a clever ruse they've fallen for, and Dean is alive elsewhere, scared out of his wits but with his soul intact.

He doesn't completely banish this idea, because in some sense, it could be true. It's just that "elsewhere" is somewhere inside Dean.

The man seems to think for a moment, and then decide the comment isn't worth acknowledging. By way of answer, he says, "Sam with you?"

Sam freezes, because the other option is to bury his face in his hands and start hyperventilating and maybe even weeping. The verbal confirmation that they've found his brother in this stranger shouldn't change anything. They already knew pretty much for a fact that this is the man they're looking for. And yet here he is, trying to hold himself together.

Cas hesitates before answering, and Sam vaguely wonders how he'll elect to respond; forthrightness in general doesn't seem wise right now, but lying would be utterly futile.

What he does say catches Sam very much by surprise: "I didn't want to bring him."

The man who is _probably_ Dean but just _can't_ be raises his eyebrows. "Oh?"

"He wishes to cure you. I told him that your soul is condemned, marked by Lucifer himself, and that we should not strive to liberate those who are anathema."

 _He probably pretty much means that,_ observes a sardonic voice in the back of Sam's mind, and he screws his eyes shut. Realizing that he can't miss a single moment of this, he opens them again immediately.

The man's not playing around. He nods slowly, thoughtfully, for a long stretch of about two seconds, and inclines his head as he asks his next question in a way that is so _Dean_ it's unmistakable, even seeing it on a total stranger. "How'd you two find me?"

Cas barely pauses. "Do you really think I'm going to answer that?"

Voice carelessly even and face totally impassive, the man says without missing a beat, "You might be a bit more chatty after I peel the first few square inches of your skin off."

 _Look_ , observes some part of Sam's brain that he can't quite identify, _he's talking to the angel the same way you talk to demons._

The exchange has caught the attention of a few nearby patrons, who are glancing over their shoulders at the two men standing in the middle of the restaurant with looks of concern. Suddenly it occurs to Sam that it may be prudent to get as many people out of here as possible.

As soon as the thought crosses his mind he knows he has to try it, even if there's the chance that Dean won't let him. The blood of the people Dean has killed so far is on _his_ hands. He can't let anybody else die. Not if there's something he can do about it.

He sucks in a deep breath, reaches into his pocket, and all at once springs to his feet, displaying his most recent fake badge as prominently as he can and barking to the entire establishment, "FBI. I'm gonna need everybody to vacate the premises, now."

Every pair of eyes in the building, at least two dozen, is on him. Most startled and confused, one very grave, and one quietly amused.

"I said _now_!" he repeats, voice rising to a full-on shout, and most of them at least begin to stand up, but too many are still sitting there blinking stupidly. Sam sighs a little sigh, reaches into his coat, and withdraws his gun, pointing it straight at the stranger's forehead and cocking it.

The firearm sure gets the job done; the mass exodus that ensues sees many people neglecting to grab various belongings such as coats and purses, and the odd shout of alarm and frantic call to some other patron sounds as they all thread around the three strange men, parting clumsily around them but not daring to touch them, and bolt for the door. Even as they move Sam does not take his eyes off the man, who likewise does not take his eyes off him.

Where Dean's hair is very dark blond and always neatly combed Ivy league style, this man bears a slightly grown-out buzz cut that's a very average shade of brown. Where Dean's eyes are green, these are steely blue. The skin folds around them differently, suggesting somebody who laughs much more readily. He is very tall, even more so than Sam, and something in those eyes implies he is very much enjoying looking down on him.

Sam sees nothing that he knows in the man, but the man regards him with a familiarity that's unmistakable.

The only door finally slams shut, leaving the three of them alone.


	10. Breaking

Several seconds pass during which none of them moves. Cas's eyes never stray from the man who has to be Dean and Sam stands with the gun still aimed squarely at the man's forehead. The whole time the man is the very picture of calm, but after a long pause a knot of mild puzzlement forms between his brows. His palms turn outward slightly in a questioning gesture and he says, "Um, relax, Sam. Everyone's gone, you can put the gun away."

"Dean?" It just slips out of him. Simply because he cannot reconcile what he is witnessing and knows must be true with what he knows _cannot_ be true… he has to make sure.

 _Demons lie_ , one of the many voices in his head reminds him, but just for now, he snuffs it out.

The man rolls his eyes in the most dramatic fashion apparently possible, but says nothing.

"Are you really Dean?" he whispers, not trusting himself with his full voice.

Those eyes come to meet Sam's, and they are utterly unfamiliar. "I was," he says.

It's not the first time Sam has wished Dean were only dead. He'd be more retrievable if he were—he's come back from death countless times before. Like this, he's just… he's just _gone_. At least the Dean that Sam knew, and knows. The Dean that still exists is rapidly turning into something else entirely; he's falling down a pit and it seems there is no bottom. And the further removed he gets from what he was, the more terrified Sam is that they'll never be able to pull him back from oblivion.

"You know," the man comments in the silence, and Sam's eyes refocus on his—but _they're not Dean's, this is not his brother, not even close_ —"I definitely like being taller than you."

Sam blinks dumbly. There's something in the grin that curls the man's mouth, the show of simple pleasure in a meaningless triumph, that _does_ ring familiar. He recalls all the pranks they used to pull on each other, those little tricks they haven't had the energy for in years, and how every time Dean pulled one over Sam he would cackle in jubilation until Sam's resolve broke and he laughed right along with him.

Those were the days when there was still life in Dean's eyes.

"I haven't been here for more than an hour, I don't think…" the man muses. "How long you been tailing me?"

Sam tries to swallow, but nothing goes down. His mouth is too dry and his throat just closes up. But before there's time for a real pause, Cas interjects, voice grave as it's ever been: "Long enough to know you need to be stopped."

The man widens his eyes in exasperation, but doesn't press the issue. "Right," he mutters, and eyes Cas. "So, you would rather kill me," and he turns to Sam, who's still struggling to recall how to organize and articulate his thoughts, "and you would rather let me go to kill others. My, my. Dissent in the ranks." He chuckles. "You got the Blade on hand? Or have you forgotten that that's the only thing that can actually put me down?"

Sam hasn't forgotten, except on occasions that he had to because too many emotions were filling his brain for rational thought—when he was holding that knife to Dean's throat, for example. It doesn't matter anyway; he's glad of the fact the man has just stated, though shame burns within him on acknowledging this, even to himself.

He remembers that he's still holding out the gun, and he lowers it. The movement feels strange; usually it signifies a shift in the tone of the conversation, the decision to be a little more trustful. Now, it's simply because there is no point to it anymore. Though it does provide a nice complement to the raspy words Sam finally manages to push through his lips: "We don't want to fight."

The man nods, lips pursed, and replies promptly, "Smart of you. So then what exactly do you want?"

 _Just let me live my life, I won't bother you. What do you care?_

A suspicion is beginning to creep into Sam's mind that he actually means these questions genuinely. And it scares him almost as much as the idea of Dean's rapid spiral out of his reach.

"You really don't know?" he manages, and immediately clears his throat, because damn, he cannot keep sounding like he's about to fall apart every time he opens his mouth.

The man immediately shrugs. "No, I do. You want to pump me full of a magic 'cure' that will turn me back into what you want me to be, or maybe need me to be. Pass. We done?"

Sam can't think of a single thing to say.

The stranger waits, looking back and forth between them for a few seconds, before letting out a long, quiet sigh. "Okay, you know what?" He holds up his hands, smiling mirthlessly. "I'm over this. We've met too many times for you to still be alive."

The smile drops from his face as he waves one hand in the slightest motion, hardly any more than a twitch of his fingers, and Sam finds himself sailing backwards through the air. He makes a delayed attempt to curl into a ball to protect his head and chest, but it hardly matters, because he ends up in the middle of the floor, a wooden chair splintering underneath the force of him coming down on it. The _crack_ is so loud his ears are ringing as he lies there, trying to collect himself, and even distracts him for the first few seconds from the splitting pain in his thigh.

But then it comes, and he's biting back a scream, and he turns his bruised body over painfully to examine the damage. An enormous chunk of wood, about half of one of the chair legs, protrudes from the outside of his leg, a few inches above the knee. Blood wells around it, but it's the sight of the foreign object jammed so far into his body that finally rips the scream out of him after all.

Words are floating vaguely through his head but they're not his, in fact he thinks somebody else said them out loud… maybe they came from Cas's direction? He struggles to focus on what they actually were and finds them incomprehensible, until he switches his brain over to recognize them as not English: "Exorcizamus te, omnus immundus spiritus…"

He looks up, clutching his leg between both hands, just in time to see the man twitch his fingers again. Another piece of chair flies off the floor and across the room. Sam follows its path with his eyes and blinks, the pain making his brain fuzzy, as he tries to process the sight before him: Cas, pressed against the opposite wall, feet several inches above the floor, apparently utterly unable to lift his arms or head from it, and a chunk of wood wedged firmly between his teeth.

"None of that," comes that unfamiliar voice, sounding largely unconcerned. "I happen to be enjoying this body, thank you very much. It's a good fit for me."

Sam tries to focus on his face, on his words, tries to block out the pain using the psychological tricks he's been refining throughout his life, and gradually that anguish begins to fade, at least enough for him to think with the barest modicum of clarity.

"I tell ya," the man continues, "the first couple didn't do much for me. I felt, quite literally, very uncomfortable in my own skin. Figured out at maybe the fourth or fifth body that you need to give 'em a few days, break 'em in. After that? Feels like the body you were born in."

Sam knows he has to say something. Keep him talking. Maybe, with some careful manipulation and a generous dose of luck, they'll still be alive when the authorities come around. And maybe, by some miracle, there'll even be enough that Dean will bail rather than leaving behind another massacre. Finally he manages to push out, voice strained and shaking, "And this? Who are you riding right now?"

The man seems utterly unfazed by his efforts, and responds casually, "His name's Kaden. Kaden… Norwick? Newton? I forget. He's probably a long way from home, but I can't really be sure—picked him up at an airport. Poetic, dontcha think?"

Sam is silent, just watching the blood pool slowly on the floor beneath him, strangely detached from the sight. He feels Cas's puzzled glance on him. To him, though, Dean's meaning is crystal clear—an allusion back to the very first demon they ever encountered. The phantom traveler. Everything's come full circle.

Thinking back to the whole fiasco, all he can picture is Dean's terrified face as their flight began, and what he wouldn't give to see that familiar fear, that human weakness, in him right now. He responds in the only way he can think to respond: to try to remind Dean of the same thing. "Surprised you voluntarily got so close to planes without having some sort of breakdown."

The grin that curls the man's face is sickening. He can't decide whether it's a grin he might see on Dean's face. He really doesn't think he knows anything for sure. "Knew you'd try that. But ya see, Sammy, that fear is dead and buried now. Along with all others. It was based in reality, but the degree to which it manifested in old Dean-o was irrational, and oh how very human it was. What reason does a demon have to be afraid of plane crashes? We _cause_ the crashes, bitch."

The question _Is that what you were doing?_ hovers on Sam's lips and dies. He doesn't want to know. "You don't have to be a demon," he whispers, but by this point the words sound lame even to him.

Dean is clearly and predictably unimpressed. He leans in over Sam, until he can feel the breath threading through the host's lips on his neck and he cringes because even _that_ is unfamiliar.

"I don't think you're listening to me, Sammy," he breathes, so softly. "You always did have problems with that. I'll go nice and slow: _I. Want. This._ " He snaps up to stand fully upright again, but he continues seamlessly: "Holy hell, I want it so much. I'll tell you why life as Dean sucked so much ass—the work was never over. And in a sense, sure, he loved the work! He loved helping people and feeling for a fleeting instant like he was worth something to the world. Like an adrenaline rush, or the sweet, glorious high you get before you wake up barely able to move and feeling like your head's gonna split open and the cops find your meth lab and your life falls to pieces. Only for him, it happened pretty much on a weekly basis. He loved the work, but the work never loved him back. All he wanted in return was for you to be safe. And—" He cuts himself off with the most mirthless chuckle Sam has heard in his life. "No. Never mind. The point is, he never was able to convince himself that it was fair that he had to save all these people and couldn't even survive living out of his car without committing regular credit card fraud. Some thanks, huh? Do you even know how many times the two of you saved the world? I sure as hell don't! Lost count! I am finally _free_. Of all the confused guilt, the obligation, the PTSD, the nightmares, the shame, the alcoholism—I mean I'll still embrace that, but for different reasons—the constantly trying and failing to justify the general crappiness of life, and most of all, the constant fear of losing your sorry ass."

Sam finally gathers the wherewithal to attempt to move, even if he can't stand just yet. But when he drags his impaled leg two inches across the floor, a cry of pain rises from his mouth.

The man stops and shifts his attention completely and immediately to Sam. After a few moments of considering him silently while Sam just tries to hold it together, the man smiles, and sinks down to his level, balancing on the balls of his feet next to him. "Let me help you with that," he says softly, voice dripping with false compassion.

In one fluid motion, he grasps the spike of wood and yanks it out of Sam's leg.

The scream he produces is unearthly. The pain bursts like an atom bomb throughout his entire body and his feet kick, his muscles working overtime to try to provide some sensation that will distract him from the horror show his leg has become. The blood is pouring out of him hard and fast now, and he feels himself very quickly going into shock. Between the large black spots that rapidly explode in irregular increments over his field of vision, he sees the man adjust his grip on the stake-like chunk of wood and pull it back as if aiming carefully, his gaze trained on the center of Sam's chest.

A flash of movement, a split second of unbearable agony, and then Sam is flying.


	11. Lost

Castiel can't stop this.

He remains pinned to the wall as he watches the man he once saved butcher his own brother. When he first beheld Dean Winchester as he suffered in hell, he could see straight through to the pure goodness in his soul. They had called him the righteous man, and though he himself could not see it, they could hardly have been more right.

And now he is heir to the Father of Murder.

Castiel remembers, many ages ago, when Lucifer first began to feel dissatisfied with the way things were run. Before, all the angels were happy. They lived their days in a perfect bliss that Castiel can recall objectively but isn't sure he'd recognize if he felt it again. When fights began to break out in the higher ranks, the younger angels huddled together, clinging to one another in profound worry and even fear, yet unwilling to voice their concerns, under the delusion that doing so would suddenly make the situation become more real. Like if they stayed quiet, it was more likely that things would go back to the way they were. That the Light-bearer would come back home and everything would be perfect and peaceful again. But all the hopes and prayers in the world seemed to make no difference at all, and heaven was never the same after the day the first of God's chosen fell.

He hoped he'd never have to see his family turn against each other again.

Sam is almost certainly dead after the monster drives the enormous splinter of wood into his chest, but Castiel is unsurprised when the attack does not stop there. For the first several seconds he watches in horror as the creature that Dean Winchester has become proceeds to thrust the stake into his brother over and over and over. When he drops it, grabs the largest piece of the splintered chair that remains, and raises it over his head, Castiel does the only thing he can and closes his eyes.

The loud crack of Sam's bones splits the air, followed by a laugh of triumph.

Castiel does his best to block out the sounds, reassuring himself that Dean can't kill him—he made a point of not bringing his angel blade so Dean will have no access to angelic weaponry—and once he's gone, as long as Sam's body remains in one piece, Castiel can resurrect him, if need be. Never mind Sam's emotional state when he wakes up. Never mind how much energy it will cost him.

Until he abruptly finds himself dropping to the floor, stumbling a bit once his feet hit the faded tiles and biting down hard on the chunk of wood in his mouth. He spits it out immediately, but he can feel the splinters in his lips and gums.

The man strides over to him, covering his mouth with a vice-like grip with one hand and pinning his arms to his sides with the other. Castiel struggles, but the monster wields a supernatural strength beyond anything he can fight, at least without tapping into his grace—but he has to conserve that as much as possible if he has any hope of saving Sam. He roughly searches Castiel's pockets, no doubt hoping for an angel blade, and finding nothing, he curses under his breath and snarls into Castiel's ear, "You're coming with me."

He drags Castiel to the door, and upon stepping outside he stumbles, stopping short of the edge of the devil's trap. For a fleeting moment Castiel is hopeful that he is trapped now, but with grunts of exertion, the monster manages to drag both of them over the line.

Castiel's heart drops.

Dean is immune to devil's traps.

The situation, which was already very, _very_ bad, has just managed to get worse.

The moment they're both across the line and clear of the trap, a flash of black manifests at the edge of Castiel's vision, and he finds himself in a thickly wooded area, Crowley's hand gripping his wrist firmly.

"Bet you miss being able to do that," the King comments smugly.

"Where are we?" asks Castiel automatically, and then, not waiting for an answer, "Go back and get Sam."

Crowley rolls his eyes but compliantly vanishes. Castiel barely has time to blink before he reappears, kneeling on the ground over the unmoving body of Sam. Castiel looks away, suddenly feeling like he might vomit.

"He's wrung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible," Crowley observes casually. "This is an ex-Winchester."

Castiel holds off on the gut instinct to punch him in the face, and instead crouches over Sam, laying his hand on his temple, immediately smudging his fingers with blood. As he scopes out the damage done to the body, eyes shut, he can tell it's extensive. His stomach lurches as he considers how many of these wounds he will have to heal if Sam is to be able to use this body again. It'll take even more energy than he thought.

His brain freezes as he detects, against all odds, the breath of Sam's soul still clinging desperately to the body.

Castiel doesn't know what this means. If this could be only clinical death, potentially reversible. If Sam could possibly still be alive, or if he's caught in the space between.

But the wisps of Sam are getting further out of reach with every instant he wastes, so he elects to stop wondering and get to work.

He begins pouring his grace directly into the still-warm body, and his wounds begin to close up, the blood that he's lost begins to regenerate, and all his organs gradually return to working condition. Castiel is rapidly losing his ability to focus, to breathe regularly, to stand steady on his own two feet. He feels like he's just run a marathon and hasn't slept for a week. But if he stops now, Sam won't survive.

He's about ready to black out by the time he finally thinks Sam's body is ready to function again. With what feels like the very last shred of his energy that remains in him, Castiel reaches out, grasps the fading tendrils of Sam's soul, and forcibly pulls him back into his body.

He drops to his knees next to Sam's head, breathing hard, just as Sam's eyes fly open and his lungs fill up with air in an enormous, ragged gasp. A split second later Castiel can see the agony twist his features, and it's not a surprise at all—both his legs are still badly broken, and a couple ribs too, and deep cuts are scattered across his entire body.

Sam's face is a barrage of confusion and anguish and fear, and it's the fear that most pains Castiel, because he knows what he's afraid of. What he's afraid happened. And, at least as far as Castiel is able to tell, he's right.

Almost on reflex he reaches out, pressing two fingers gently to Sam's forehead. His expression goes slack, his eyes slide shut, and his head drops lightly onto the fresh soil. Castiel watches him for a few moments, and on seeing he's breathing, shallow but steady, he himself drops back into the grass.

"So, seems negotiations didn't go so well," observes Crowley, but rather than his usual brand of sarcasm, his tone reeks of restrained anger.

Castiel shakes his head, lacking the desire or indeed the strength to respond verbally.

"Where was he trying to take you?"

Castiel frowns. He breathes out slowly, trying to build up the strength to form a complete sentence, and manages in a quiet voice, "Away from Sam."

Crowley is silent for a moment. "I see. Try to keep you from being able to heal him. Smart." He exhales through pursed lips, and looks at Castiel deliberately, his tone dropping. "Always was smarter than you two gave him credit for." Then, louder again: "Way to unleash him on the world."

Castiel thinks he's heard Dean use a word that would aptly describe Crowley's attitude right now, his obvious belief that he is the better friend to Dean, and his hurt bewilderment at his rejection. Dean would say he's "butthurt."

Instead of articulating this, he asks lowly, "How did you find us?"

"I'm going to assume you're not an amnesiac who can't remember that I was the one who gave you the spell that led you here," Crowley growls, "and further deduce that you're pointing towards a different question. Not sure which one, but basically, I was waiting outside to see if you let him make it out the door. Saw the devil's trap and wasn't worried, but what do you know, he appeared to be unaffected by it. Got an explanation for that?"

"He was…" Castiel tries, and trails off, sucking in another breath.

The demon stares at him for a couple seconds, waiting, and Castiel wonders if he's imagining the faint reddish hue coloring his forehead. "You're idiots, the lot of you," he finally snarls. "The Winchesters—and to a lesser extent, you—terrorize me for years, representing the single biggest inconvenience for the entirety of my time on the throne. There've been times I've thought you weren't so bad, but I was always wrong. Every time I turn the corner you're there to cause me yet more grief. You, or at least they, killed everything that came their way. And now that one of you is the target, you fumble every opportunity you get. Have I got that right? Has Squirrel really been the sticky stuff holding you together this whole time?"

Castiel is silent.

"It's just pathetic. You're welcome for saving your life, by the way."

"He wasn't going to kill me."

"Oh, that's right, forgot. He can't." Crowley fixes him with a glare. "Once again—he can't kill you, and yet you both got your sorry arses handed to you?"

"We have far less experience trapping things than we do smiting them," Castiel murmurs.

"You certain there's no way to smite him? Didn't you tell me that you might have to kill him to fix the problem?"

Castiel exhales in as controlled a manner as he can achieve, and explains, "We thought the blood cure might be affecting him differently than other demons. He appeared to be dying. It won't be relevant until we can recapture him anyway. And barring that… Yes, we're sure. The only thing we know of that can kill him is the First Blade, and the only ones who can wield the First Blade are bearers of the Mark of Cain."

"Dean and Cain," Crowley supplies. "Thought about talking to Cain?"

Castiel's thinking slows. Have they? Sam certainly hasn't, and though Castiel is clearly much more willing to do what needs to be done, it's true that he absolutely would rather save Dean if at all possible. Cain would be their last ditch effort when they finally decide all hope is lost, if that day ever comes.

"Just take us back to the car," he mutters, though he questions how on Earth he's going to find the stamina to drive over eleven hours back to the bunker. Or produce a suitable explanation for Sam's condition to convince a hotel staff not to call the police. "Need to pick it up."

Crowley stares at him, eyes wide with anger. "At least say please," he fumes. "I'm not a bloody taxi service."

Several seconds pass. Castiel would sigh, if he thought he could spare the breath. "Please," he says, voice low, making sure not to expend any more effort on the word than he needs to.

Crowley doesn't look at all appeased, but he nods stiffly and says, "I'll go alone first. In case the police have shown up already."

He vanishes, and for the next full minute Castiel just watches the reassuring rise and fall of Sam's chest. Thinking maybe a hospital isn't such a bad idea. Even though he knows that if any of these injuries are going to kill Sam, he would have known, and healed them.

Then again, these days it seems nothing is for certain anymore, and he's operating on borrowed grace.

Crowley alerts him of his reappearance by saying, "I'd know that car anywhere; I've spent enough time in its boot. It's nowhere to be found. Was Moose carrying the keys?"

Castiel blinks, the words registering with him slowly, but once they do, he's shoving his hands into Sam's coat pockets. His jeans next, out of desperation. Nothing.

"Well," says Crowley after a moment, "the good news is you don't have to drive back."

Castiel stares at the ground. Dean has the Impala again. Along with everything inside it.

He doesn't know why it feels like such a defeat.

All at once Crowley's hand is on his shoulder and he's resting on a paved road. He looks up. His surroundings are unfamiliar, but he is able to immediately identify the building at whose doorstep they rest as a hospital.

"You two obviously need some time," says Crowley, looking down on them in disgust, "and I need to stop leaving this job in your hands. Make sure Samantha gets patched up, try not to die or whatever, and I'll take care of Dean. If you think you have a new argument to convince me you'll actually be useful in this endeavor, call me. Till then, stay out of my way."

Just like that, Crowley is gone, leaving Castiel to try to come up with a semi-reasonable explanation to offer to the hospital staff now swarming around them.

And try to put the image of his best friend brutally murdering his own brother out of his head.


	12. Separation

It's not too difficult to feign total incoherency to avoid having to give an explanation for their presence and conditions. Castiel babbles a bit, making sure to fail to make eye contact with any of the nurses, and they stop asking questions pretty quickly.

He ends up in the psych ward, where he stays until the wee hours of the morning, falling asleep despite himself. After he wakes up around 3am, all it takes is a few small instances of "suggesting" to the hospital staff what to do and remember, and he's quickly wheeling Sam on a gurney through the parking lot in the dead of night, every so often glancing over his shoulder, looking for signs of pursuit.

Both of Sam's legs are covered in thick white casts and he bears bandages and stitches all over his body. What skin is uncovered is obviously badly bruised. But he's stable. He'll pull through.

He has to.

He uses the last of his slightly renewed energy to place his fingers against the forehead of a man in the parking lot and tell him to hand over his car keys, walk in the other direction, and forget the last few minutes. As Castiel hauls Sam into the vehicle, he knows this is sloppy and dangerous, but he's out of options. It's moments like this he misses his wings the most.

Fortunately, Crowley was… _kind_ enough to deposit them at a hospital very near the bunker, and, banking on the fact that nobody just stumbles across the bunker, he just parks it right where the Impala is usually kept.

Hauling Sam inside is more taxing than he expected, and by the time he dumps him on the couch, he feels another long sleep coming on. When he wakes up, he feels the weight on his chest before he even recognizes his own consciousness, and once he identifies it, he wishes he were still asleep.

Reluctantly he rolls over on the couch to check across the room and see if Sam has woken up—hoping he hasn't, because he has no idea what he's going to say to him. He breathes a silent sigh of relief on seeing him still stretched out loosely on the couch opposite him, mouth hanging open, chest rising and falling steadily.

Castiel doesn't know what to do in the silent hours that follow. He finds himself wandering up and down the halls, regretting having Sam draw angel warding around Dean's body; if he could, he would wander into the room just to remind himself that that _creature_ is a completely separate entity from Dean Winchester. For there Dean Winchester lies, peacefully asleep.

What sad times are these, when the only thing an Angel of the Lord can do to help even himself is kept out of his reach by scribblings on the wall.

He clenches his fists. There must be something, something he can do. No creature of heaven is ever completely helpless; only unimaginative.

Slowly the beginnings of an idea start to take shape in his mind.

* * *

Dean spends the first hour of the drive screaming in absolute fury.

Crowley's involvement, while a genuine surprise in the moment, has made it clear to him how he was found—the spell they used to locate Cain, when he got this thing on his arm in the first place. He deeply regrets not asking more questions about it at the time, because now, as far as he knows, there is nothing he can do to hide himself from it. There is nowhere he can run where they will not find him.

Fortunately he should have at least a little time, but that's the main object of his rage—that he failed to take care of the two only things he really has to fear right now. Sam was dead, but there is no reason to suspect Castiel hasn't brought him back by now.

He should have thought things through. Should have checked to make sure he could take out the angel before taking out Sam.

He was certain before that he couldn't go back to being that broken, worthless shell of a man again. But now, having done what he's done? He'd rather die, and in a very permanent sense.

The human Dean was too weak to handle something like this. It would destroy him. It would be _kinder_ , frankly, to make sure he never sees the light of day again.

But Sam is too obsessively dependent on the guy to let a good thing be.

He finally manages to calm himself down enough to stop tearing up the car as he drives—he's hit the steering wheel so many times Kaden's hands are bruised, and early on he put his fist through the driver's side window. His knuckles are bleeding and the pain is definitely muted but annoying, and finally it occurs to him that now that Sam and Castiel have seen him, he should probably ditch this body.

Freaking just when he was starting to settle down in it.

He hops on into the only other person filling his car at the next gas station he stops at, and quickly withdraws, sliding back into the Impala and slamming the door shut. He sits there in his new body, a fortysomething man with a receding hairline and a fairly lengthy beard, and silently observes Kaden's prone form as he starts to stir on the concrete. Consciousness seems to rush to him suddenly—the realization of where he is, the pain in his hands, the vague memory of riding shotgun in his own meatsuit for the last few weeks, and he scrambles quickly to his feet, checking his pockets with increasing desperation.

Dean, not wanting to stick around to be asked for help, drives away without looking back.

* * *

Body hopping is a pretty entertaining way to fill the hours, but that gets old fast.

The fourth body is one he immediately thinks he could get comfortable in: a man in his early thirties—not too rickety nor baby-faced—definitely fit but not bulging with conspicuous muscle, his face decently good-looking but not identifiably so. The only problem is the hair. It's straight and seems manageable but long enough to partially cover his ears and Dean just can't see himself getting used to it.

He decides this is a good place to stay, and books a motel room for the night.

When he wakes up it takes him less time than usual to remember where he is and who he's riding, but there's something else distracting from all of that—an immediate itch that he can't reach, at least not now.

He has to kill someone.

But trying to find human beings who have it coming, at least in the moment, is getting tiring.

He suddenly remembers that he's come back into possession of an incredible arsenal collected for the sole purpose of killing supernatural entities, and books it to the car. Immediately upon throwing open the trunk he turns aside, cursing his brother under his breath, as well as the human version of himself—because even if he's able to get through these types of warding signs, it'll hurt like hell.

No. Not like hell. Not nearly that bad. He can handle it.

He eases his hand down into the weapons stash, and his arm starts to burn like holy water—just less acutely. Grimacing, he sifts around for several minutes, but the demon-killing knife is nowhere to be found.

Sam must have had it somewhere on his person. In the moment, when what he was after was about twice as large, it didn't occur to him to look for it. He groans in frustration and strikes the underside of the hood, leaving a depression in the metal the size of his fist.

Straightening up, he eyes the markings. He may be one of them now, but that doesn't mean he feels any sort of camaraderie or trust towards demons. If anything, they're even more against him now than before. So the question is… does he submit to going through that pain every time he needs to get into this trunk just to make sure his ass is covered, or does he scrub off the markings now and risk getting robbed?

The decision is pretty easy. He's not planning on going out of his way to do any hunting, and killing without weapons has proven to be an interesting challenge. He'll have little reason to need any of this equipment.

He slams the trunk shut and gets back on the road. Short term goal: find someone to kill. Long term goal: find the only weapon he'll ever need again. While avoiding demons and _hopefully_ putting down his pain in the ass brother permanently somewhere along the way.

Hell if he knows how he's gonna swing that, but he's got time. He's got all the time in the world.


	13. Heavy

Castiel wanders back to the main lounge area where he left Sam after spending two silent hours in the lower level to find Sam awake.

He's pulled himself to a sitting position, but he's not moving. His eyes are fixed rather sightlessly on the thick white casts encasing his legs, and his head turns ever so slightly towards Castiel when he enters the room, but his eyes remain glued to the same spot. Castiel notes immediately that his shirt is unbuttoned. Many of the wounds the area sustained had to be healed for him to be able to use his body again, but Castiel had to leave several, ones that had not damaged any internal organs or major arteries, as they were. So his chest is covered with bandages and must be paining him horribly, but… but at least he can't tell how extensive the damage really was, so there's hope that… that he doesn't know what happened.

"Sam," Castiel says by way of greeting, voice light with relief. "It's good to see you awake."

At this Sam does meet his eyes. And his own are _dark_. Darker than Castiel has ever seen them. To Castiel's surprise and dismay—though "dismay" is really far too weak a word—they seem to carry no questions. Uncertainty, perhaps, and dull terror, but no true curiosity. It is a look of heavy silence.

"How long was I out?" is all he asks, his voice soft and shaky.

"Almost twenty hours," Castiel supplies, voice just as low.

Sam doesn't directly react. His eyes flicker back down to his legs, and Castiel can feel the _confirmation_ hanging in the air. He can feel the already answered questions running through Sam's mind, Sam's conscious refusal to give them a voice.

Nothing needs to be said out loud. None of this has to be made any more real than it already is.

But Castiel can't think of a single thing to say that doesn't terrify him. If he lists Sam's injuries for him, he runs the risk of Sam asking for clarification. Same if he describes what happened. Anything like "You just need to rest" would be at best patronizing and at worst an outright lie. Every second the silence continues his fear of what Sam might say grows.

In his countless millennia of silently keeping vigil over humanity, one of the things he grew very good at spotting was temptation. And he can see in Sam's eyes how dangerously close he is to wanting to give up.

Not giving himself time to consider whether it's a good idea, he blurts, "I've been on angel radio."

Sam blinks, and slowly raises his eyes again to meet Castiel's, his brow slightly furrowing questioningly.

"Asking around," he elaborates, voice quieter, reminding himself to tread a little more carefully than that. "Seeing if anyone has any information on the Mark, or the Blade. Particularly the older angels. The ones who might remember."

Sam's look of mild puzzlement has fled, and now he just looks dead tired, and he opens his mouth but this is exactly what Castiel was afraid of, this lack of feeling, of purpose, of hope, so he barrels on before he has to hear Sam say it: "I know there's not much of a chance that there's any useful information out there that we don't already have, and even less that anybody will know it and be willing to share, but it's something. If nothing else, I've gotten a few angels to agree to keep an eye out for him."

Sam blinks at him, still looking ready to fall asleep and never wake up again, but something is returning to his eyes—some level of resolve. Castiel knows that he, in his more human times, would have wept at this simple fact. It's probably best that he doesn't now.

"I guess I'll do the same," Sam whispers. "Talk to other hunters. See what they know, what they've heard. Chance of success seems even less than with you, but…"

Castiel shakes his head. "It doesn't matter. It's this or nothing, and 'nothing' has never been and will never be an option."

Sam is, in his heart, not convinced. Castiel can see that. But he doesn't have to be. He just has to try. "Fake it till you make it," as Dean might say.

"Now then," says Castiel, clasping his hands together, "you're probably hungry."

Sam slightly draws back the corners of his mouth. "Starving."

Castiel pauses, admonishing himself as he remembers he has no idea how to cook.

"You can just grab something out of the fridge," Sam says, obviously sensing this. "I think there should be some leftover takeout in there."

Castiel nods and immediately departs, ecstatic to be able to do something useful, and quickly locates the small bowl of rice and rangoon. From what he recalls from personal experience and has observed, it really doesn't seem like enough to quite constitute a full meal, of which Sam probably needs more. As he carries it back to the couch, he figures he can head to the nearest convenience store to pick up something a bit more substantial. Though his only mode of transportation at the moment is a recently stolen vehicle… That's something they'll have to think about. But not yet.

As he reenters the room, his eyes immediately fall on Sam, and it takes him a few seconds to register how he's leaning forward, face buried in his hands, his broad shoulders shaking—though even through it all he still doesn't make a sound.

Castiel almost loses his grip on the food but manages to drop it safely on the end table before he slides onto the end of the couch where Sam's head was previously resting and takes the younger Winchester into his arms.

He doesn't say "it's okay," because it isn't. He doesn't say anything. All he does is hold on tight, making his presence known.

At the moment, simply being present is a feat on its own, and the most either of them can really manage.

* * *

He considers it his greatest accomplishment so far when he walks into a small bar containing only three patrons and the bartender and kills all of them before a single one manages to scream.

He stands there, completely high on bloodlust, ears ringing, just reveling in the carnage around him and the stains on his hands, and he thinks the absolute perfection of this moment is going to be soiled by the fact that he has to walk through a door to get out.

It's so mundane, he muses as he drives away. So… irritatingly humbling. The kills were flawless and the whole endeavor should have been allowed to end there. He's dimly aware that it's strange this is suddenly bothering him, especially since he can't find the proper words to effectively explain why it does. What's changed since his last getaway? What's different?

Well, he has now been a demon for even longer.

And he's not just any demon; he has the freaking Mark of Cain. He should not be subjected to shuffling around on two feet like the human being he's glad to say he no longer is. Now he can throw people around with his mind, but there is more, there _must_ be. He can feel the unholy power inside him scratching at the walls, yowling to be set loose; he just has no idea how to channel it.

The speedometer never dips below 90 in the hour that follows, and he drives with the windows rolled down and the music turned up as loud as it gets, because even with the slight inconvenience at the end, those kills were _fantastic_ and he's going to ride this high for all he's worth.

Once he starts to come down, though, his head begins to clear a little, and he recalls a detail regarding the recent activities of his former brother that just might benefit him hugely. It takes another thorough search in the trunk after he pulls over at a rest stop, but before long he finds what he's looking for tucked away in the back behind all the weapons—a couple gallons of suspiciously-colored liquid and three large maps of the States.

They used it to find him, but if he's not very much mistaken, that's not the only piece of information this spell will give him.

Grinning almost manically, unable to hold in his excitement, he spreads one of the maps over the trunk of the car, throws some of the liquid across it, and torches it.

Sure enough, the scorched outlines of two states remain: one of Utah, where he is now, and one of Kentucky.

He's on the road again with an actual destination in mind before the sun comes up.


	14. Call

He pulls up in front of a lonely house on a farm as the sun is starting to bleed across the sky. It's a very similar location to the last one, but he notes a definite lack of bees outside.

He can feel the presence within that house. Last time he felt nothing, but now, there is something… heavy. Calling to something within him that wasn't there before.

He tries the front door to find it locked. Two solid kicks splinter it satisfyingly beneath his feet, and for a moment he simply stands in the doorway, wondering if he'll even be able to get in.

Remembering that any warding that may keep him out would also keep Cain out, he feels a grin curving his lips, and steps easily inside.

The place looks like a storm ripped through it. Furniture lies on its side, windows are shattered, glass litters the floor. Really, it's a miracle the door was still functional. Dean steps gingerly through the mess, keeping his eyes peeled for blood, but there is none. It looks like the mother of all fights went down here, except there is no blood at all.

"Cain?" he calls softly, figuring that he's wanting to make his presence known anyway, and if there's anyone or anything else here, it's not like they could do anything to him.

Total silence in response. Something in his gut tugs him in the direction of a banged-up door to his right, and he pulls it open to find a staircase leading down.

He descends the steps, whistling casually, and the lower he gets the more destruction he sees. Gaping holes spot the walls to the point where he has to question the structural integrity of the building. He can't even identify what any of this debris used to be, but it covers the floor almost entirely. He can't take a step without crunching atop it.

He turns the corner, and there, sitting in the middle of the floor underneath a devil's trap drawn in red on the ceiling, surrounded by a hurricane of wood and glass, right wrist encased in a solid metal bracelet attached to a chain tethering him to the wall a few feet behind him, is the Father of Murder. He looks terrible, but it worsens considerably after he spends a couple seconds blinking at his visitor, and his expression gains a sudden clarity. "No," he breathes, closing his eyes and letting his head hang back, a look of utter exhaustion overtaking his features. "Not you."

Not a great start, but the amusement curves Dean's stolen mouth despite himself. "Nice to see you too, sunshine."

Cain shakes his head adamantly, eyes still shut. "You can't be here."

"Funny—think I am."

Eyes finally opening, Cain drops his head back down and for the first time takes a good look at Dean. It's a strange feeling, being scrutinized so thoroughly and not knowing himself exactly what the scrutinizer is seeing. This body is very new to him. He knows the gist and he could pick him out of a lineup, but the length of his fingernails, his exact height, all the lines on his face… He can't really paint a clear picture.

Thankfully, Cain doesn't let the silence last too long, obviously knowing that the physical characteristics of his host matter a whole lot less than most other aspects of the situation. "How did you find me?" he finally asks, sounding bone-weary and somehow a little confrontational at the same time.

"Same way as last time. If it ain't broke…"

"Leave. That's your only warning."

Crap. So this is what it looks like. Cain is really trying to clean up his act. Everything inside him shudders in revulsion at the idea of being so weak. "Or what, Cain? Or what? You gonna run me through with that First Blade you don't have?"

"I can do so much worse than kill you, Dean."

For some reason the use of the name makes him wince, but he shrugs it off. "I'll use that as an excellent transition, because that 'so much worse' is exactly what I'm here to talk to you about." Pause. Cain's staring at him again, looking him up and down, a knot between his brows. Likely remembering what he used to look like and doing a side-by-side comparison in his mind. This time, Dean returns the favor. Cain's obviously been wasting away down here for a very long time, but exactly how long? Surely not ever since he killed those demons right after beaming Dean and King Bitch outside his house, that was _months_ ago. Almost a year? He can't have been down here the whole time. His hair's a couple inches longer and to say it's unkempt would be a vast understatement, which, together with his rumpled clothes and the fine layer of dust and dirt covering his skin, is… well, not a good look.

"What the hell, Cain?" he asks, still staring incredulously. "What are you doing shackled up down here?"

Cain responds surprisingly readily: "I could ask you the same. What are you doing in that body?"

He shrugs, not sure what Cain actually wants to know. "Joyride?"

"You died. You turned."

"Aw shucks, thanks for noticing."

"I remember," says Cain, his eyes far away, "when I died. I remember waking up and wanting nothing more than carnage."

Something annoying scratches at the sides of Dean's mind, like a buzzing insect. He swats it away.

"Just like you. Just like you likely will be, for years, decades. And then something will happen. You'll meet someone, see something, that will change you. Make you feel… human. It'll hurt, and you'll hate it, but sooner or later you'll find the strength to get past that hurt. To discover something that makes the righteous path worth walking, despite everything. You'll come down and you'll shake and you'll scream but you will tell yourself you have to get through this. And when you've gone long enough without killing to realize that you _can_ go on without it, you might even find the ability to feel something like happiness again."

Dean holds back an eye roll. "Beautiful. I teared up a little."

"I'm holding on by the skin of my teeth trying to be strong here," Cain says earnestly. "You are the _last_ thing I need."

"I'll try not to be offended."

"Whatever you want from me, I can't help you."

"I agree. Not when you're like this. What are you holding on for? That chick? Uh, what was her name… Cosette?"

Cain's eyes are widening, and Dean thinks he sees a warning in them, which he's ready to completely ignore. "Colette," Cain says quietly.

"She's dead, in case you forgot."

"Shut your mouth," Cain snarls. "Dead or not, I made a promise to her."

"You broke it."

"I had to. But now… I need to get back to where I was. I was good. Stable, at least."

"Yeah…" Dean glances around the wreckage pointedly. "How's that endeavor going?"

"Get out, Dean."

He's clearly getting agitated. Dean's not sure whether this is a good thing but he decides to run with it. "What ever happened to the whole 'one warning' thing?" No response from Cain. He's just… glaring, but there's no energy behind it. "What are you gonna do, Cain?" he asks again, goading. "Huh? What are you gonna do?"

"Nothing," he hisses through his teeth. "I will sit here and I will do _nothing_. I told you I can't help you. I want nothing to do with you."

"Well ain't that a treat. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be _this_." Cain grits his teeth but Dean doesn't give him time to respond, not that he's sure he even would: "And don't get all defensive, I'm not accusing you. Hell, if anything, I gotta say _thank you_. From the bottom of my scorched, blackened heart."

"A day will come when you won't thank me anymore," Cain whispers.

He holds his hand up, lip curled in disgust. "Save it. I'm not gonna rage on you for making me into this. But I am _not_ going to take it well if you refuse to finish what you started. I got the experience of some fresh-faced brand new piece of hell spawn but the juice of… well, of _you_ , and I don't know what to do with it, but I can _feel_ just how _much_ that could be."

"I'm not teaching you anything." His voice doesn't waver. "I've handed you the most powerful weapon in the world and for that I am irredeemable, but I'll be damned if I teach you how to use it properly."

"You are damned," Dean comments offhandedly.

Cain carries on as if he didn't hear him: "It would be the opposite of good for the world, and it would be at least as bad for _me_. I can't be out there. I need to restabilize."

"Yeah, how long's that usually take?" Dean asks casually. "You've been around since the dawn of man. Who knows how many times you've gone through this. How long does it take?"

Cain is silent. His eyes slide shut, but he's clearly still awake and aware. Just… blocking Dean out.

Dean's not about to give up. "I bet you're nowhere close," he presses on. "You probably spent at least a few weeks, maybe months, just trying to hang on before you locked yourself down here, but it's been a long time and you obviously still have it _bad_. Why not liberate yourself? Your pathetic existence is not going to improve from doing this to yourself."

To Cain's credit, he doesn't respond with so much as a twitch of his cheek.

Dean would love to threaten him. And he could. He could paint a vivid picture of himself sending people down here, pulling and prodding at Cain till he couldn't control himself anymore and they all went down bloody and broken in the fire of his rage. But then Cain would be more likely to seek out the Blade himself to take Dean down, and… Dean really doesn't like his chances in a fight like that. Even if he didn't react so offensively, Dean does not want a teacher who will hate him.

"By the way," he adds, almost as an afterthought, "my brother knows where you are."

At this Cain's head snaps up, his eyes meeting Dean's in alarm.

"In fact, I only got the location spell from him," Dean goes on evenly. "I've got the ingredients for the spell in the back of my car. Maybe, if you have a look, you'll be able to figure out a way to block yourself from it."

For a few seconds Cain is clearly torn, till he closes his eyes again and Dean can't tell what he's thinking anymore.

"Really, nothing to that? You're going to be found, sooner or later. You know you are." Admittedly, he was banking on that being a little bit more effective, but Cain is not responding at all. Cursing mentally, he scours his mind for more arguments. Idea after idea he throws away, knowing it's not good enough, until he lands on what he immediately recognizes as his trump card. If this doesn't work, he doesn't know what will.

After several minutes of silence, he turns, takes two steps towards the exit, and pauses. "Oh, one other thing," he comments, and can feel Cain tensing up, as much as he tries to hide it. "I killed Sam."

Cain's eyes remain closed, but something in the air has just dropped. He doesn't move a muscle.

"The fact that he's almost definitely been brought back by now doesn't really make a difference," Dean goes on. "He was dead. Without a doubt. Betcha you remember what that's like. Betcha you'll never, ever forget."

And suddenly, the _pressure_ —on his shoulders, his calves, his chest, the insides of his goddamn eyeballs, and it feels like he's being crushed from every direction. He's on the floor, arms wrapped around himself, gasping for air even though he doesn't have to breathe, and Cain is standing, _standing_ over him. Something metal crashes to the floor in a crescendo of clanking and Dean can just barely see through his darkening vision the broken chains on the floor next to Cain's feet.

"I am you," he chokes out, unable to see the face of the man he's talking to, "and you are me. I am everything you were and will be, no matter how long you run from it, and you are everything I could be. Don't make me be you alone. Don't _let_ me."

A moment of heavy silence like a looming storm cloud, and then his ribs are crushing his lungs and his brain is pounding against his skull and darkness overtakes him.


	15. Restart

He wakes up sore. He can't remember the last time that happened; he hasn't been doing much sleeping lately. Hasn't needed to.

The room is empty except for him. A massive crack through half the floor leaves the integrity of the devil's trap irreparably damaged. Dean immediately glances down at his host's—Will? that the name?—wrist, and is met with blank skin. What kind of a loser doesn't wear a watch?

Okay, it was dawn when he got here. He tears up the stairs and skids to a stop in the front doorway. The door has been ripped from its hinges. It lies ten yards out, resting in the grass in front of the house.

The sun is high in the sky. It's been a few hours.

Dean stands still for a long moment, just staring up at that flaming ball in the sky till Will's eyes start to burn. But the pain isn't enough, it isn't satisfying, it isn't _sufficiently distracting,_ and he screams, plunging his fist into the wall next to him. And he's not ready for the ripple effect that follows, because the pure, raw _anger_ channeled in that punch seems to turn itself naturally to power, spreading like a wave of energy through the house. He's into the wall up to his wrist and he screams as he pulls his hand back out, this time in pain. But there's no time even to grasp at the wounded area because the doorframe around him is collapsing and he leaps forward to avoid being crushed. He lands gracelessly in the soft grass, probably bruising something, and sits there for a moment, staring at the utterly destroyed entrance to the house.

Adrenaline is pumping through him. His hand is full of wood and losing a lot of blood but he can't feel a thing. Corporal pain is dulled to him anyway, but after that punch, that release of power… it was like relieving a tension he'd only been dimly aware he'd been carrying around for weeks.

He stands up slowly, knees shaking slightly. That power is still coursing through him. He can feel it.

His eyes land on the Impala.

He's at the vehicle's side in an instant, and throws the back door open. The back seat is empty.

He left the jugs of liquid for the locating spell back here. Didn't want to have to go through the pain of rifling through the trunk again. It didn't seem like it could possibly be any harm at the time.

The pure lightning running through his veins turns to fire, and he takes the few long strides required to bring him to Cain's front door lying in the grass, picks it up with both hands, and with an almighty scream, hurls it through the air like a Frisbee at the farmhouse.

It tears right through the wood, completely destroying the wall. Dean can only watch as the front portion of the already unstable building, with a crescendo of groaning and splintering, collapses in on itself in a flurry of wood and dust. He hops backwards, putting himself further from the reach of the wreckage, his rage quickly dissipating as he watches the destruction unfold. Dark spots still pepper his vision from staring at the sun, but the sight is still something to behold.

The house finally quiets down after at least a full minute of leftover pieces of wood coming down like light rainfall in the wake of that door. And Dean just stands there, still amazed as he takes in the now utterly inhabitable farmhouse.

He slides into the driver's seat with renewed vigor, and he'd say he's high on adrenaline if there weren't another high he's now familiar with that leaves all others behind. He'll never be truly high on anything but blood again, but this—this ain't so bad.

He's gotta find a new host now that he's half-blinded this one, not to mention his still-bleeding hand, but he was getting tired of Will anyway. And as for Cain? Screw Cain. He's weak.

Dean can figure out his abilities on his own.

Just like everything else he's ever done.

* * *

It would be best for Castiel to have a perfectly blank, silent room, a total lack of nearby stimuli, to facilitate his celestial search for information. A long time ago, he could have blocked out everything without a thought, regardless of his location or surroundings. But he is not the angel he once was. He has been weakened, even been something very close to human a time or two, and… well, sensory deprivation would help.

But he has no way of achieving it, not really. He could, in theory, choose a room in the bunker to clear out. Whenever he comes out of this utter exhaustion brought on by the use of his grace to heal Sam's mortal injuries. But even if he managed to create such an environment… there is still Sam.

Castiel is immensely concerned about Sam. It has been four days since he woke up. He has not left the couch. Castiel plans on renting him a pair of crutches—or maybe there's even a pair somewhere in the bunker, he's not sure—but Sam hasn't even asked about gaining a means to move. He seems to have no energy at all. He spends much of his days asleep, which would be good if he were getting any real rest. Instead he tosses and turns and mutters incoherently. When awake, he persists in maintaining that he plans to call up some hunters, but Castiel has not heard any such conversation. Which is fine, because when Sam makes these claims Castiel meets them with gentle agreement but no direct encouragement.

Something needs to be done. Of course it does. But Sam needs rest. Time to recover.

And, unfortunately, supervision.

Castiel can't withdraw to a soundproof room for hours at a time, because he's afraid of what he might find when he emerges. And it doesn't get any more specific than that. He's not sure exactly what he's afraid of. He just knows he can't leave Sam alone for too long.

On the fourth day around lunchtime he goes to bring him a cup of Ramen. The food in the kitchen is getting scarce, and they may have to dip into the bunker's emergency rations. Castiel still hasn't gotten rid of that car; again, it would take far too long to drive it somewhere without security cameras and then walk the whole way back, particularly with his own weakness in the wake of healing Sam. He's not sure how they're going to manage without the Impala. Eventually he intends to ask Sam if he has any connections that could get them a new vehicle.

He aches every day for the millennia he spent taking his wings for granted.

Sam accepts the insta-noodles with a quiet "Thanks" and quick, forced smile. As has become his habit, Castiel takes a seat in the couch across from him to watch him eat, make sure he finishes the simple meal.

"You know, you don't have to watch me," Sam says, not for the first time.

"Eat all the noodles and prove it," Castiel challenges. And maybe it wasn't the thing to say, but Sam compliantly continues eating, slowly but steadily.

When he's nearly to the bottom of the cup, his phone, sitting in the middle of the coffee table between them, rings. Both of them quickly crane their heads to see the screen.

Said screen reads "666 calling." Sam picks up the device and his expression doesn't twitch before he answers the call and places the phone back on the table. "You're on speaker, Crowley."

"I'm standing outside your bloody demon-proofed safehouse," barks the voice on the other line. "Get out here now."

They both immediately look to Sam's legs, encased in casts that aren't going away anytime soon. And immediately after that, they meet each other's eyes, both sets wide.

"I'll let you in," Castiel says tiredly into the phone, still maintaining eye contact with Sam.

Sam blinks, but he nods. But before Castiel can make a move towards the door, he says, "Get the Colt."

They've allowed the King of Hell entrance into this building before, but their destination was always a prison cell coated with warding sigils. And Crowley would probably make a sarcastic remark to this effect, except when Castiel finds him, he looks absolutely past banter.

Neither of them says a word, and Castiel leads him inside to where Sam is sitting upright in the couch, the Colt in his hand, pointed at Crowley. "One wrong move, I blow you away," he says, voice flat and lifeless.

Crowley rolls his eyes. "Whatever. I only bring news, and no news is good news. It's the locating spell."

The locating spell they haven't been able to use in four days. Castiel and Sam glance at each other briefly.

"Leaves from suicide palms. One of the ingredients." Crowley is shaking with anger. "Suicide palms are a very rare type of tree, found only in a remote part of Madagascar. Various parts of them have been ingredients in a handful of location spells I've come across in my many years—always for very dangerous creatures. And all of them are gone. The entire area where they can be found has been burned to the ground. I could still see some embers glowing and smoke was still in the sky."

Sam's gone pale.

"So what you're saying is," Castiel says slowly, "we have lost all access to the locating spell."

Crowley's eyes widen. "No. I'm saying we can't make any _more_. I gave you two gallons of that stuff. Enough for many more spells."

Sam's hand goes to his forehead. "Everything we had was in the Impala."

Crowley's gone still, and he looks back and forth between them. His face reddens, veins bulging in his forehead. "You bloody _idiots_ ," he snarls, spitting out the words like poison, and then he is gone.

Sam immediately drops the Colt to his lap, and covers his face with both hands. "What the hell are we doing, Cas?"

Castiel stares at him with eyes wide, unsure of how to respond.

"We're spinning our wheels. We've hit so many walls and things just keep getting worse and worse."

"He has the Mark of Cain," Castiel says slowly, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. "It is ancient and very, very evil. This was never going to be easy."

"I don't ask that it's easy, just that it's _possible!_ Cas, what can we do?" He's staring at Castiel, eyes enormous and searching for just a scrap of hope to hold onto.

It's not that Castiel isn't in complete agreement that this is insane. But he can't let that show. One of them has to pretend to have hope. If Sam can't be that one, it has to be Castiel. "We can make calls," he says solemnly. "You keep saying you're going to contact some hunters, so do it. Spread the word of the demon who is immune to devil's traps. Somebody will find him for you. Sooner or later. But this can't happen if you don't get the word out."

He never would have believed it but he can already see the difference in Sam's eyes. There's a spark in them that wasn't there before.

"In the meantime, I'll be searching for information on the Mark and Cain. Anything the angels may know." He fixes his gaze on Sam. "What can we do? We can try. We owe it to him, everything he's ever done for us, to try."

It is with this thought that he leaves Sam on the couch to call to mind everything his brother has ever sacrificed for him without even letting on that it was hurting him, and how much he needs them now.

Castiel knows the math adds up, but they have so little to add to the equation that he's not sure he himself is so convinced.

Doesn't matter. It's very little, but it's something. And something is all they need.


	16. Sides

_Hey guys, don't want to be that person, but I have a reason. If you're reading this, make it clear that you are. Reviews are the best way to do that. Because I'm working on another very long fic that_ is _getting reviews, and it only makes sense that I spend more time on the story that people are asking for updates on. If you ask, I'll gladly prioritize A Candle Burns in a higher slot, but if you don't, updates won't be very frequent. That will be all, please enjoy this chapter._

* * *

After securing a new host, a well-built military man with tan skin and a buzz cut, Dean's next step is to find somewhere he can practice. And there are a couple parameters that have to be met.

He needs a place away from people, preferably far away. He doesn't want to attract attention. But far away from people, like in open fields, there's nothing to work with.

He's almost tempted to just return to that farmhouse outside Bradfordsville, but he has good reason to believe that Sam and the angel have taken note of the location. No reason to risk their checking it out.

So he puts Kentucky in his rearview mirror and just drives. He doesn't stop for a full day.

* * *

As the days pass, it is a constant battle in Sam's head as to whether or not he's going to slip into despair. He is always teetering at the edge of that chasm and it would be so easy to just take a wrong step and fall head over heels into the darkness. And sometimes he does. But he is always quick to claw his way back up.

He gets to work calling up all the hunters he knows, and that number is vast. All he tells them is that he came across a demon whom he caught in a devil's trap, but it was able to escape. Of course he doesn't say that that demon is his brother. Of course he can't. And the vast majority of them won't have access to any demon-killing weaponry, so there's no reason to suspect they'll try to get the drop on him, if they ever even encountered him. But on the very off chance that they did… they would find the attempt entirely unsuccessful, and Sam would be in part responsible for their subsequent brutal deaths.

With the dawn of this thought, after the first few calls he starts warning them that his demon-killing knife was useless against it.

* * *

He deems it time to stop once he hits New Mexico, and soon enough he comes across an area where the houses are spaced large distances from each other, with decent stretches of land presumably belonging to each resident. The first one he finds currently unoccupied, he moves on in. The house itself is small but there's a tiny hill, a large shed, and a wooded area out back. After helping himself to what's in the fridge, he heads out to the shed.

Now that he has space to himself, all the flashy basics are almost shockingly easy to get started on.

He can feel the power bubbling within him, and when he lends it enough focus, it explodes through his eyes and the world around him is changed for it. If anything, it's _too much_ power, because the first time he feels its release he has no idea what he's doing with it. As it turns out, he's teleporting himself through the wall of the shed, but somehow still barreling straight through it, utterly destroying the structure's integrity. He lies in the grass, slightly winded and covered in wood, watching the mostly-obliterated portion of wall, but somehow the shed doesn't collapse just yet.

He climbs to his feet, brushing himself off.

Time to try again.

* * *

After five days Cas finally brings up their car situation to Sam. He hasn't been thinking about that at all, to be honest; hasn't been relevant to him. He still can't move. Not even crutches are gonna do the trick with both legs broken this badly. He could seriously use a wheelchair, but they actually don't have one of those lying around the bunker, at least as far as he's aware.

He calls up one of Bobby's old contacts and after a lengthy conversation, everything's arranged. The next morning, the stolen vehicle is taken away and replaced with a red Toyota Camry. At least that's what Cas tells him. Though he also says it looks new, which Sam sincerely doubts.

* * *

Moving things with his mind is something he's been using a lot, particularly when he was having his whole "kill as outrageously as possible" phase. That skill doesn't need a lot of practice, per se. But it could certainly use some fine-tuning. The uses of telekinesis are not limited, by any means, to fighting.

This takes more patience than he's willing to muster at first, but all the motivation he needs is the memory of his Blade. He _needs_ it back. Ready to do whatever it takes to recover it, he devotes hours and hours every day to the tedious and frustrating task of developing his abilities.

* * *

Sam's forgotten how to converse. It's after his attempt to make a joke about Chinese takeout is such a terrible failure that it elicits a pity laugh from Castiel, Angel of Awkwardness, that he becomes aware of this. He's rotting away, lying on this stupid couch, not able to focus his thoughts on anything at all except that thing that it is not healthy for him to be focusing on for any length of time.

His brother is a demon—or rather, his brother is out of commission and his soul has been taken hostage by a demon. That's the safest, most accurate way of thinking about this. And it's always been Dean's job to protect Sam, but Dean can't even protect himself anymore, so the tables have turned. He is out there doing all kinds of things that will kill him of guilt even if they can manage to bring him back. But Sam. Can't. Do. Anything. About it.

He just hopes that Cas is doing something productive in the hours and hours he spends sequestered away upstairs. But Sam can't bring himself to ask when he strongly suspects, based on the angel's silence, that he has found nothing at all.

* * *

Weeks pass, and he can't handle it anymore. He knows he still has a lot to learn. This will likely be true for hundreds of years. But he's made progress, he knows he has, and he is itching to put his new skills to use.

He starts out discreet, unnoticed. He finds a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere and settles down at the bar for a beer. As he sits there enjoying the drink in solitude, he surreptitiously locates the one security camera in the joint, and pops the lens right on out. It's done before he is able to process it and in his shock at the success he just lets it fall to the floor, but nobody seems to notice, despite it being relatively quiet. The music's not especially loud and there's less than a half dozen patrons.

Feeling damn terrific now, he gives the "Fill me back up" gesture to the becoming bartender, and as she's pouring him another drink, he asks, "Business usually this slow?"

"Eh," she responds, stashing the bottle behind the bar, "I wouldn't really know. Just started."

"That so?" He eyes her up and down, more openly than he used to. Her long blonde hair falls to graceful waves near the end and almost brushes against the counter.

"Don't you go thinkin' I'm a rookie, though." Her eyebrow quirks in self-confidence. "I did the exact same thing somewhere else for a couple years."

"What made ya leave?" He takes a swig.

"Well, it got too popular. Too loud. Too crazy. Too many jerks." She shrugs. "I like this better."

"I betcha you could've handled it," he says, offering a smile.

"Could've. Did. Sure didn't want to any longer."

He raises his glass in a half-toast. "More power to ya."

She seems to look at him for the first time, and he knows he's doing well. Sure, this wasn't the plan, but he always has time for a hot girl.

And it is at this point that the door opens and a couple guys come in, one of them clearly having a _fan-friggin-tastic_ time, if the volume at which he's speaking is anything to go by. Dean grimaces, turning back to the bartender. "Speakin' of loud and crazy."

She starts cleaning a glass with a cloth. "He's a regular. That's just the way he seems to talk. Never causes any trouble, s'far as I've heard."

Dean doesn't particularly care. He doesn't like him. He can barely hear himself think over his roaring laughter. Remembering what he set out to do, he decides that this man is, in some form, going to suffer tonight.

Suddenly an image pops into his mind, of Cain simply twitching his fingers, and Crowley sputtering softly for a second or two before going completely silent.

Dean stares at his hands, one of them still clutching that glass. He can do that. It's inside him, somewhere. He knows it.

And all of a sudden he's thinking about all the things he must be able to do that he hasn't been able to practice. Stripping a person of his powers of speech? Obviously can't even attempt that if he's alone in a partially-destroyed shed. There is a treasure trove of manipulative demonic strings he can pull and he is beginning to realize it's a network he _needs_ to learn more about.

Somebody's gotta come home with him tonight.

Not Loudmouth, though. He might have it coming, but he's too annoying to deal with.

"Hey, sweetheart," he asks the woman behind the bar. "When's your shift end?"

* * *

Sam is still lying eternally on that couch, not doing anything in particular but considering calling Cas to get him a snack, when suddenly he is not alone.

She appears as a young woman, perhaps aged 30, but with very, very old eyes. It's not like it's a combination Sam's never seen before. Her brown hair is all tucked into a large, very neat bun on the back of her head, and she wears a gray denim jacket over a simple white dress. And he does not at all like the way she's looking at him.

"Who the hell are you?" Sam demands—or more like asks frantically as he grasps for the gun full of rock salt on the end table behind him. His hands tremble ever so slightly as he points it at her, for a variety of reasons that don't bear consideration.

She regards it, gray eyes completely unimpressed, and she looks back to meet his eyes without making a move to disarm him. "You may call me Eloise."

"Yeah, I mean _what_ are you," Sam growls, trying to sound threatening, though he is painfully aware of how difficult that task is when you're sprawled on a couch with both legs broken. "How did you even get in here?"

"Sam!" comes Cas's voice as he appears at the top of the stairs, but he skids to a halt before he begins descending, and stays still for a moment, staring at the new arrival. "Are you Eloise?"

Sam glances up at Cas for the briefest of seconds before returning his gaze to the woman, but his eyebrows are drawn together in confusion. "You know her?"

"How did you find me?" Cas asks the woman, apparently not having heard the question.

"I am very, very old," she responds matter-of-factly, "and you are very, very weak."

"Cas," Sam repeats. "You know her?"

"I… I just found her," Cas responds, apparently still a little shaken. "Mere moments ago. I told her—"

"Cain has left his mark on another man," the woman finishes, eyeing Sam. "You know of this, I assume?"

Sam swallows the lump in his throat as discreetly as he can manage. "He's my brother," he says by way of answer, voice hoarser than he wants it to be. "The 'another man.' He's my brother."

Eloise nods, expression now grave. "You have my condolences."

Sam lowers the gun, very strongly suspecting it wouldn't be any use anyway. He hears Cas beginning his trek downstairs.

"You will tell me everything that has happened," she continues, "and I, in turn, will tell you everything I know."

"I don't see why we should tell you anything," Sam counters. "You still haven't said who you are."

"She's a reaper, Sam," Cas says, no doubt in his voice.

Sam turns to the angel. He's stopped at the bottom of the stairs, very near the couch where Sam now lies, and he meets Sam's eyes briefly to showcase his certainty before returning his own to Eloise. Sam does the same. Her gaze holds a profound and ancient sadness.

"That I am," she affirms. "I'm the one who reaped Abel."


	17. Illumination

_For the record, I'm flat-out rejecting season 9's sudden decision to classify reapers as a type of angel. They never were before and that was just a really stupid move. Reapers are reapers and angels are angels. End of discussion._

* * *

They start from the beginning. Neither of them was present when Dean took on the Mark of Cain, but they know enough about that day, and what's most important is why he did it. They spill everything, from Abaddon to Gadreel to Metatron, and at least for Castiel, it's like watching Dean crumple down from the good man he once was to the next monster they have to hunt all over again.

It falls to Castiel to recount to Eloise their most recent encounter with Dean, and he hates every second of it, few though they be. He breezes through it with the summary, "We tried to convince him to continue undergoing treatment. We were turned down."

He feels Sam's eyes on him, heavier than he can express. He forces himself to act like Sam's not present at all.

Eloise interjects before he can go on, "Was that when this," and she gestures broadly to Sam, referring to his general physical condition, "happened?" Her eyes strongly indicate she already knows, maybe even more than the information she's requesting.

Sam, of course, knows the answer to be yes, but he locks his gaze on Castiel, daring him to elaborate beyond that one simple word.

And all Castiel can say is "Yes."

He sees the tension leave Sam's shoulders, but not from relaxation.

Eloise nods, and motions for him to continue.

"We've been here since then," Castiel says simply. "Just recovering. Sam from his injuries, me from the ones I healed. And making calls. Like the one that brought you here."

"Does anyone else know what he is?" Eloise inquires. "Aside from you two and Crowley? And, of course, Cain?"

They both shake their heads. "No," says Sam, "at least assuming Crowley hasn't told any of his underlings. Which isn't quite what I'd call a safe assumption."

A few seconds' pause, and Castiel dares to say, "Time for you to tell us what you know."

Eloise looks at him for a long moment, and finally she nods. She takes a few more moments, no doubt casting her mind far, _far_ back, and confirms this with her first words: "When the human population consisted only of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel, I was… so curious about them. Unspeakably so. I was the only reaper stationed on earth at the time, and I had never seen a human before them, much less reaped one.

"God never gave me express permission, but neither did he ever forbid me from… going down. And talking with them. And Cain, Cain I took a special interest in." A half-smile flickers and dies on her lips. "I'm not just Abel's reaper. I was also Cain's friend."

Castiel glances automatically at Sam, who also meets his gaze.

"I cannot express to you," Eloise continues, voice completely neutral but eyes far away, "the pain I went through when he sold his soul to protect his brother's. But it was nothing compared to the day his eyes went black." Her gaze returns to them then, her expression full of nothing at all. "I have existed since the dawn of man and nothing I have experienced since then has compared. He was a good man, when he was a man. But the change was immediate. The difference between him and Dean is of circumstance, and it is the reason I do not envy you one whit." Again she smiles, and the expression is free of any mirth. "There were no humans around then for him to kill."

Castiel's brow furrows immediately. "But the Mark demands blood. He would have _had_ to kill, or he himself would have died."

Eloise shakes her head. "The Mark kills its bearer only to move him towards resurrection as a demon. Once this has happened, there is nothing more the Mark can do." She sighs softly. "As long as he was serving Lucifer, the Mark was satisfied. Besides, killing demons worked and works just as well. Even animals take some of the edge off."

"The way you describe the Mark seems to support the way I have come to think of it," Castiel says slowly. "In my eyes, he is not Dean Winchester with the influence of the Mark of Cain—he is the Mark of Cain with the memories of Dean Winchester."

"An interesting perspective, but one I would somewhat dispute," Eloise responds bluntly. "The Mark is a very evil influence, and it _does_ have a will of its own, but it does not exist in its own right. What it does do, however, is unleash all the basest and darkest desires of the one who bears it by removing the proverbial dam. Even the most profoundly good man is cursed with original sin—the fault of Cain's parents. The Mark would strip him of any virtue that keeps that concupiscence in check, of any desire to be good.

"Perhaps it would help to compare him to other demons. Now, demons come into existence when a human soul has been tortured for so long that it is no longer recognizable as human, even by the person himself, or herself. A man becomes a demon when he forgets, irrevocably, what it is to be a man. He loses his morals that way; they just fade into oblivion and they're replaced by scar tissue. Dean's moral compass was _ripped out of him_. By the Mark. He doesn't care, but he still _remembers_ what it is to care. To be good. It's fresh in his mind; it's just that he's been freed from the burden of a conscience."

Sam stares at her for a good long moment, shock written clear across his face, but there's a thoughtfulness behind it. "That would tear him apart," he whispers at length.

"Indeed," she says agreeably. "Eventually. Once he's been running from his erstwhile humanity for so long he has nothing left to distract himself. But this will not happen until you are long dead."

Sam's expression is almost catatonic—a ridiculous descriptor, Castiel knows, as he was just talking coherently, but it is the one that springs to his mind nonetheless. And suddenly his gaze snaps up towards their guest, his eyes growing large and taking on an almost manic glint, and he says, "He wants to get rid of us. That must mean we remind him of what he was."

"I will say this," Eloise says softly. "After Cain turned, it wasn't me he wanted to get away from. It was his parents."

Sam and Castiel, nearly in unison, blink, expressions blank.

"Angels and reapers are forces to be reckoned with," she goes on quietly, somberly, "but there is nothing quite like humanity. Imperfect, making frequent use of their free will which allows them to make mistakes, but always also feeling the drive to become something greater. Demons feel nothing of the kind. They know they _cannot_ be anything greater. But such a sudden demon as the Mark creates—he still feels the echo, and it is strengthened in the mere presence of a human being. What he almost certainly is not aware of is that on an unconscious level, while he still remembers himself, he _wants_ to feel this echo, he _yearns_ for it, and it draws him to mingle with humans. But a human who knows what he used to be? The line is crossed. It is too much."

Castiel understands. Of course he does. He has always been aware of the cavernous gap between angels and men. But something inside him grows hollow at her words regardless. Perhaps the part of him that indeed once was human.

"What I am telling you, Sam," Eloise says, slowly and carefully, "is that you have the unique ability to inflict a world of pain on the thing that used to be your brother. If you were to appear to him a few hundred years down the road, it may help you win him back. Right now, he would kill you for it."

"Cut to the chase," Sam growls. "Is it enough?"

"To do what? To open him up to the idea of the cure, under any circumstances?"

Sam nods.

"No."

Castiel sags at the dull certainty in the word, but Sam snarls, striking the coffee table with more force than Castiel would have guessed him able to muster. "Then what the hell are you doing here?"

"I am giving you context," Eloise intones, unimpressed by his outburst. "It is rare to be able to foresee uses for such a thing. In the event that you can keep yourself safe, your mere presence will serve as a very effective distraction to him. And mainly? I am offering you my help. Am I correct in deducing that your plan is to find him, trap him, and cure him?"

"Yes," Castiel says.

"All distinct and challenging steps, but a reasonable solution. You are very fortunate to know of this cure." She gives the slightest of nods, considering them for a moment. "You have an ally in me. I will be looking for him. If I find him, or any trace of him, you will know immediately. If you find him, tell me, and I will have you standing next to him, or vice versa, before you can take another breath. I ask only for one thing in return."

Immediately Castiel is on high alert. But Sam asks before he can: "And what would that be?"

"We use the blood cure on Cain as well," she supplies swiftly, simply.

Castiel blinks, shocked, and is surprised when Sam replies readily, "Deal." He glances at Sam, his own eyes still wide. He's seen this expression on the man before. It is one of utter determination. And inherent to determination is hope. It's more hope than he's seen in Sam in quite some time.

And in turn, Eloise offers the closest thing to a genuine smile she's displayed thus far, and says, "I'll be in touch."

With that, she is gone.


	18. Rekindled

Two weeks have passed when Cas finally gets a hold of some crutches. Sam knows the fractures were very, very serious, but if he stays lying on this damned couch for another second he is going to lose his mind. As Cas helps him to an upright position and he begins hobbling around the bunker, he feels something very close to euphoria—for about thirty seconds, before he slips and ends up on the floor with a stabbing pain shooting all up his left leg.

"Sam!" and Cas is immediately at his side as he lies there grunting, trying to push himself back up. "Are you okay? Are you injured further?"

"I think I'm fine," he grunts, endlessly frustrated.

"You know I don't have the energy to heal you if you hurt yourself again, Sam."

"I know."

"You need to get better as fast as you can."

"I know, Cas."

"Which means _be careful_."

Sam curbs the urge to sigh deeply and dramatically. "It could be another four weeks before I can get around on my own even with crutches." He rubs roughly at his dry eyes.

Cas is silent for a long moment. Finally comes the oh so graceful subject change: "So. Got anything to report?"

"Jack squat. I've been trying to get a hold of Crowley, see if he's found anything. I've left a couple messages. But he's not picking up."

"He did seem rather… irate, when last we saw him."

Sam gives a humorless chuckle. "Yeah, he was pissed." The smile quickly drops off his face. "I'm worried, Cas. I want to know what he's up to. What if he finds Dean and doesn't tell us?"

Cas shakes his head. "We simply must trust that our own resources will find him first."

Sam knows they're past the point of questioning whether trust like that is warranted or deserved. It's the only thing they've got left; can't look a gift horse in the mouth.

He's never felt so helpless.

After a long moment of somewhat awkward silence, he says, "Cas?"

"Hm?"

"Can you help me off the floor, please?"

* * *

The bartender's name is Harper. Harper doesn't seem to like much being tied up in the shack that Dean has taken over, but Dean assures her it'll only be a few days. After that point, he'll either kill her before she can die of thirst, or decide to let her go. He's not sure which. Normally it wouldn't even be a question, but… well, he's not sure what the "but" is.

By the end of the second day, he's had no success at all in doing any of the things he's tried. Not even in shutting her up, the only ability he knows for a fact that he has. As he sits in a bar—not the same one Harper came from, of course—in the middle of his second shot of whiskey, he curses Cain for refusing to help him. He knows he'd be so much further along if he had a teacher.

Whatever. Life's never done him any favors. He's still not sure why he's ever surprised when his plans go to hell. When have they not?

"What's eatin' you?" comes a voice from off to his side.

He doesn't know why, but he turns to see who it is. A kid is looking back at him from a couple seats over, holding a bottle of cheap beer that he's clearly made some progress on. Dean performs a double take at seeing his age—he can't be any older than twenty-five, if that—and he wonders for a split second at the strangeness of being addressed conversationally by somebody who's still college age, until he remembers that his current host is twenty-eight, an apparent peer. He's still not used to it.

He peers over at the kid. He's got on a pale blue button-down with a pencil in the breast pocket. His hair's in that slightly spiky style and Dean things he sees something vaguely Asian in his features. He's a pretty good-looking kid. What's he doing alone in a bar on a Wednesday night?

"Life," he says by way of answer, after a long pause.

The kid chuckles. "Ah, the age-old bane of man."

"And you?" Dean ventures. "Lemme guess, a girl?"

The kid shakes his head in a highly exaggerated motion. "No sir. Classes suck mightily right now. Get this—I might be about to flunk my first class of college. It'd delay graduation."

Dean twitches slightly at the words "get this." "So what?"

"So what, that's what I keep askin' myself, so what if there's a semester's delay, and I can't find a solid answer, but it feels devastating anyway, ya know? You put something up on a pedestal for ages and then when it's almost there and suddenly you realize you might not get it—even if it's really not essential, ya gotta almost reshape your world view."

Dean shrugs. "I wouldn't know. I don't put anything on a pedestal unless it _is_ essential."

"Teach me your ways, oh master." The kid grins, obviously amused with himself, and sticks a hand out. "Noah."

Dean considers the hand for a few moments, before accepting it and giving a shake. He needs the brief pause, to remember his host's name. "Emery."

Noah releases his hand and leans back, taking another swig from his bottle. "So then, Emery, what's on your pedestal right now?"

Dean doesn't hold back an eye roll; the kid seems too wasted to notice anyway. He guesses he has been spending a ton of time in bars lately, and he's been due to have a drunk stranger get weirdly personal on him for a while now. "There are a coupla degrees of pedestals at the moment. Trying to get good at something so I can use those skills to get the thing I really want."

Noah nods knowingly. "In the workplace?"

"Sure," Dean says flatly.

"It's not going well, huh?"

Dean stretches his mouth wide in an obviously fake smile. "How couldja tell?" With the glance over at the kid that accompanies the response, for the first time he notices the cross hanging around his neck. For some reason, Dean grimaces at the sight of it.

"I'll tell ya what, man," Noah says, leaning in conspiratorially. Dean automatically responds in kind, and immediately braces himself to regret it, but the smell of alcohol on Noah's breath is not nearly as strong as he'd expect. Kid must be a lightweight. "If you're struggling, that's good, because you're still fightin'. If you're in pain, it's good, because it tells you you're not dead yet."

This eye roll is much more exaggerated. Something deep inside him twitches, though—the words would have meant a lot to the man he used to be. "Oh, but I am. You don't get much deader than me."

"Dead inside, yeah, yeah, so am I, so are all of us." Right, he's a college student. Noah blinks at his bottle for a moment before returning his attention to Dean. "Then… what've you got to lose?"

Dean blinks.

It's far more motivating than anything he would've expected out of tonight.

"Now, God knows I'm talking out my ass—" and at that second word Dean flinches. He can't help it; something inside him twists sharply on hearing it, and it hurts, it really does, far more than Dean would've anticipated, but the flare of pain fades rather quickly, and Noah is still talking, but Dean's pretty done listening to him. He was annoying, then surprisingly helpful, and now he's outworn his use. He gets up and leaves while the kid is in midsentence, and just turns over the situation in his head on the way to the car.

He has nothing to lose.

He has nothing at all.

Dean—the old Dean— _Dean_ is past saving. The demon that he has become is not going away anytime soon. He is _free_. Freer than Dean ever was, or could've hoped to be.

It's like he's been born again.

And he's not gonna waste this second chance at life. Not another second of it.


	19. Faces

He doesn't let up on Harper for two days straight.

He doesn't get tired. Why would he? She does, though, and she even does a little sleeping—when he tells her to.

He doesn't know what happened, or when, or why, but he ain't about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and it's like a switch has been flipped. He can control or at least influence more than he can even think of, he's sure. He can tell her to sleep, to speak, to shut up, even to feel pain when he's not doing a thing to her. The success rate isn't even fifty percent, but he's starting to get it, he really is.

Finally deciding it's time for a break around dusk on the second day, he drives an hour to a five star rated club to have himself a good time. He most definitely plans on killing somebody by the end of the night—he's been getting pretty antsy—but he wants to be careful, because he really is enjoying Emery's body. Can't have the accompanying face plastered all over the local news.

Problem is, as soon as he walks through the door, beyond all the flashing multicolored lights and rave music and drunk people dancing, his eyes immediately land on the one face that stands out among all the rest of them.

The man locks eyes with him, and they stay still, separated by thirty feet and lots of tables and chairs occupied by people of varying degrees of intoxication.

Dean sighs, and walks right back out the door, circling around the building to the alleyway next to it. There goes the whole night. At least he'll get to kick someone's ass, even if he doesn't succeed in actually killing the guy.

The man has come to stand before him with such purpose that, even though he knows it's beyond stupid to blow his own cover, the question slips out: "The King send you?"

The man scoffs. "'King.' If you're referring to the glorified crossroads demon currently sitting on the throne of hell, no." He shudders, as if appalled by the very thought. "He is no king of mine."

Dean tilts his head. That's good, he supposes. He's got no way to kill this thing—or at least, if he has, he hasn't figured it out yet—and if they share a mutual repulsion towards Crowley, that's not a bad start to an amicable meeting.

The man glances up at him, examining him closely. Dean is, not for the first time, absolutely fascinated by the way his real face manifests over that of his host—like a pale orange mask resembling a beaten, scratched skull covered by scraps of charred flesh. The bone structure is a facsimile of that of his true body, however many hundreds of years it's been dead and buried. What he sees of demons' "true" faces are a superficial glimpse into a life long forgotten, and they're one of the most gruesome things Dean has ever seen in his long life of living nightmares, but somehow that doesn't bother him anymore. Which is good, because his own face now appears as something very similar.

This demon turns his stolen face towards Dean's, looking rather stoic as he says, "You're Dean Winchester."

It's not a question. Dean steps back, ready to start throwing punches. "How do you know that?" No point in denying it.

"I wouldn't expect you to remember. I saw you, several times, back when you were learning from Alistair. I sometimes worked alongside him, usually just delivered messages to him though. I remember you very well. You remember hell?"

Dean thinks he has some questions, and he opens his mouth, but the demon barrels on without giving him time to formulate one: "I mean, the _real_ hell. What it once was." The man shakes his head. "Of course you remember. It was… well, it was hell. Blood and rotting flesh everywhere, rattling chains, nonstop screams, no upkeep, only the very best torturers doing their work, a never-ending lightning storm, torture chambers miles deep for each individual soul. The very air you breathed was laced with fear. It was _properly_ agonizing and terrifying. I don't make a habit of visiting home, but I've been there once recently, and…" He shakes his head. "He hasn't the faintest idea how to rule. It's a dank old dungeon. Souls get packed into cells and forgotten. They can speak to each other, they can reminisce about the glory days. I've even heard that it's possible to _escape_ now. How many hundreds of additional years must it take for the 'let them lie' method to warp a human soul into… into _us?_ I suspect it would never even happen. There may never again be any new demons."

Dean cocks his head yet again, wondering. He remembers. Of course he does. He never could forget. He got off easy—forty years of that torment seems like a very small price to pay when he takes into account his numbness to all earthly pain, his indefinite lifespan, the power he can feel coursing through him with every breath. But this demon, whoever he is, became what he is now after countless centuries, maybe millennia, of being torn apart. Of what he couldn't handle thirty years of, before he…

Anyway. What he doesn't quite get is… why should this demon care? He's done his time, and no changes that Crowley makes now will make any kind of difference. It's over for him. He is left to prowl about the world causing fear and havoc and sin. Exorcisms notwithstanding, he never has to be anywhere near hell again.

 _You're a demon, Dean. Think like one._

Of course.

It's pettiness. A sort of pettiness that runs very deep, but pettiness all the same. If a kid consistently gets grounded and sent to bed without any dinner for speaking disrespectfully to his parents, and then years later has a stepfamily with a younger sibling who continually does the same thing only to be met with light scolding, he will lament the days gone by where there was actual discipline and order in the household. He will fume over the injustice of it all and miss the parent who actually had the spine to raise the kids right.

"You want a regime change, is what you're saying," he ventures to the demon.

He looks sidelong at Dean, narrowing his eyes.

"Totally not interested in the position," Dean clarifies, and he couldn't be more sincere. "Just asking."

Slowly the demon nods. "Yes. I want the fear returned to hell. I want things as they were. Crowley has proven himself to be utterly unfit for the crown."

"What did you think of Abaddon?"

He shrugs. "I was ambivalent, but if she'd won and shown herself to be a competent ruler, I would have followed her."

Loyal to the country but not to the king, nor any ruler in particular, unless they prove themselves worthy of the country. Interesting. "Got any details from when you were down there? Weaknesses, specifically?"

Once again the demon looks at him askance. "Why?"

"Look," and he leans in closer, "you obviously feel very strongly about this, and I ain't gonna tell you I share your passion, but I think we are in agreement in not liking Crowley very much. Me, it's because he took something of mine. Problem is, he hid it, probably very well, and I very much doubt he's told anyone else where it is. I have no plan for getting it back, but I need it. So all I can do right now is gather information. So I tell you what: if you help me get it back, I will kill him. Guarantee it. I have no idea who will take the throne after that, but Crowley will be gone. That much I promise you."

The demon is interested. He's not bothering to hide it. He's weighing his options now, wondering if he really has anything to lose from this deal. Dean watches him, waiting for him to realize that he doesn't.

Finally, the man leans forward, and says in hushed tones, even though they're the only ones standing in a dark alley, "You're not gonna believe this, but… the King is currently having some mommy issues."

Dean blinks. And blinks again. "…Pardon?"

"His mother, this Scottish witch called Rowena. She turned up not too long ago and apparently she's been whispering in his ears ever since. She claims to love him and he almost seems affected by that. But most demons seem to agree that she's just a manipulative bitch. It's very like that king of ours to be swayed by such a thing, isn't it?"

Dean is still trying to work through the initial whammy this news presented. "Crowley's… _mother_ … is still around?"

"Yeah. It's weird. And unfortunate for everyone involved. But there you go—probably his biggest weak point right now."

"Um." Dean releases a chuckle of disbelief. "Ten outta ten for the surprise factor."

"Hopefully it's also useful to you. Do with the information what you will." The demon regards him. "It's been interesting to see you again, Dean. Take care. At least till you can take out the king. After that, honestly you can do whatever the hell you want."

Dean lets him walk off down the dark alley, disappearing quickly into the shadows. He's not sure why. The night on the town effectively ruined, he gets into the Impala and starts back towards the shed he's called home these last several days, spending the whole drive in contemplative silence, not even turning on the radio for a little background noise.

Once he arrives back, he finds the chair where Harper's spent the past half-week empty, cut ropes lying haphazardly on the ground around it.


	20. Reversal

Immediately Dean gets a wall behind his back, scanning the area closely. He closes his hands into fists, naturally wanting to be holding a weapon, but he tells himself he doesn't need one. At least not any mundane one; it would be insulting to the weapon he's meant to be wielding to pick up a hammer from a worktable or something.

"I know you're there," he intones, moving nothing but his eyes at first, but then stepping slowly away from the wall to walk towards the center of the room. He's trained himself to be cautious, and it can't hurt to keep that up, but it's not like they can do anything to him, not really.

No response rises. Amusement colors his tone. "Come out, come out, wherever you are…"

He can feel the fear in the air. It's… intoxicating.

"You know, your coming here is really a blessing in disguise, if you'll pardon the expression," he goes on. "It's been far, far too long since I killed anything."

He suddenly stops short. Automatically looks down at his feet, and, seeing nothing there, up above his head. At first, he doesn't see anything there either—the lighting in here is crap—but after a moment of focus and letting his eyes adjust, he can make out the devil's trap laid on the ceiling in dark paint.

And suddenly, there they are. A girl maybe around Emery's age, brandishing a shotgun, her dark hair secured in a long braid, with thin-framed glasses sitting upon her pretty face. The next, gun trembling in his hands, is a dark-skinned boy, maybe not even of drinking age, looking not at all ready to be here. But the third one—the third one takes Dean by surprise.

His genuine reaction should probably be worry at being tracked, but he's not about to show that. So instead he releases a laugh of disbelief as he takes in the sight of the young man pointing a pistol at him, and greets, shaking his head, "Noah, my man, how's it hanging?"

The kid he met in the bar two days ago only smirks, holding the gun steady as he approaches. He's looking Dean up and down like a trapped animal, and it's pretty insulting honestly, but Dean's too busy trying to get his head on straight and, oh yeah, being a _bearer of the Mark of Cain_ to give a damn about how this kid looks at him.

"Guess you're not as much of a lightweight as I took you for," he surmises.

"Oh, no, that's pretty much how he always acts," the girl confirms. "Maybe a little louder than usual, but he probably wasn't even drunk. He just psychs himself up so much to get drunk that he acts like he already is right after starting his first beer. It's honestly pathetic."

She's so casual. So _secure_. He looks back and forth between the two of them, noting the similarities. They have the exact same color hair, the same chin. "Brother and sister?" he guesses. They give no reaction either way, which he takes as confirmation. "Well that's nice. You can die together."

Noah glances over at the girl, and Dean most certainly detects some genuine fear in his eyes. His lips curl in amusement, especially when the kid goes on to look back at him and reply confidently, "Good luck making that happen."

Dean looks up at the ceiling again and throws a hand up in casual indication of the devil's trap. "What, this little finger painting?"

He sees it all in their eyes. The sudden uncertainty, the attempt at disbelief. No, they're telling themselves, he's just bluffing.

The perfect reaction.

He steps to the edge of the devil's trap. Silently breathes out, bracing himself for what's to come. They've got their shotguns ready. There's probably no real need to fear that, and anyway, it's now or never.

Grimacing, producing grunts of pain that he can't hold back, he takes another step forward, forcing himself outside the trap.

He straightens up, still panting a little, and makes the mistake of stopping to relish the looks of fear on both the siblings' faces. As a result, he's not able to react quickly enough to the footsteps rapidly approaching him from the side, and something hard and metal crashes into the side of his head, turning everything to darkness.

* * *

So maybe covering the guy's mouth with duct tape that has devil's traps drawn all over it after filling his mouth with salt, using the rest of the salt to draw a thick circle all around him and the rest of the duct tape to bind his limbs as thoroughly as possible, and bringing in every bottle of holy water they have in the car to have on standby is overkill. Maybe. But they all agree overkill is better than stinginess in this case.

Adelaide is nearing the end of the first roll of duct tape, trying her best to avoid touching the man's skin, and to think of anything but how far this is above their pay grade. They've been hunting for what, six months? Never even caught wind of a demon till now, but they always thought they'd be prepared. Learning how to draw the devil's trap was one of the first things they did. Fat lotta good it did them.

She glances over at Cody, whose movements are still sluggish. He keeps just staring at the demon's—Emery's, as Noah told them—face, a look of morbid fascination and horror sitting upon his own, and Adelaide keeps having to shake him out of it. She's still not sure he should be here—has half a mind to send him to wait outside. He already drove that poor woman to the nearest hospital and came back, all while they were lying in wait here for the demon to return. She really doesn't think he's up for this. Which is ironic, considering he's the one who first got them into this hunting thing. Ever since, he's been the most halfhearted of all of them. He's more suited to research, and yet he keeps insisting on being present in the field. Well, one thing is for sure: of the three of them, he's the least likely to mess up the exorcism. And he's already proven himself beyond useful, having probably saved their lives by whacking the demon over the head at the last second.

Noah, meanwhile, is off on the phone, as he has been since he finished drawing the salt circle. He's been describing the situation to Walter, Cody's next door neighbor and the guy with all the experience as far as they're concerned. He's been with them on a hunt or two, but mostly he's just advised and worried, researched, and worried some more.

"I've heard of this guy," he says shortly after Noah finishes his summary of the situation. He's not on speaker, but her brother's just deaf enough that Adelaide can hear him clearly anyway if she's paying attention. And the level of fear in his voice does not sit well with her. "It's been a couple weeks now, but I heard it through the grapevine that there was a demon, or at least something demonic, out and about that was immune to devil's traps. The Winchesters encountered it and they were trying to find it again."

"The Winchesters?" asks Noah. They've heard Walter drop the name a few times. They're practically living legends, as far as Adelaide's gathered. It's odd to hear them talked about like something accessible.

"Yeah. Well, Sam was the one my buddy talked to. I didn't even speak direct with the guy, but…" Walter's voice shakes. "You kids are in over your head. A regular demon alone would be more than enough for hunters as inexperienced as you, but this… I want you out of there. I'm heading out now, I'll do the exorcism, just leave it to me."

"C'mon, Walter, the exorcism's the easiest part. And anyway, we don't know that he's immune, Addie smudged a little part of the trap so maybe—"

"Can you seriously tell me that that was the problem, beyond any shadow of a doubt?"

Noah sighs silently. "No… No, I'm not sure, but—"

"Guys," Cody interrupts. "I think he's waking up."

Adelaide looks. He's just as still as before. She hopes, for about the eighty-first time in the last ten minutes, that his host is still alive. He has a pulse, but she's not sure if that means anything. "Steady on there, Codes. But he's right, bro, we need to get started."

"Right," Noah acquiesces.

"Keep me on the line," comes Walter's voice as Cody pulls his prayer book from his pocket.

"No need to leave home, Walter," Noah says by way of answer. "We're an hour's drive away. It'll all be over long before you arrive."

"I'm starting now," says Cody, and they both automatically pull their respective bottles of holy water from their pockets. He gives it a moment of silence before turning his eyes towards his book and starting to read: "Exorcizamus te…"

Immediately the body stretched out on the floor is stirring, and they both start unscrewing the lids of their bottles. The demon's eyes fly wide open, and they're pitch black, and Adelaide knew that that sometimes happens but she has to stifle a gasp at the sight regardless. Cody, on the other hand, just about drops his book.

"Keep going," Noah urges. "Hurry."

Cody fumbles to find his place again, as the creature on the floor struggles to sit up, his eyes darting all around, taking them in, looking down at himself and seeing how tightly he's bound. His eyes screw shut as if in pain, and Adelaide's not sure if it's the devil's traps all over him or the salt or the words of the exorcism or, most likely, all of the above, but it seems to be effective.

As Cody keeps reading, the demon flinches, and quickly the flinching turns into thrashing. His body thuds repeatedly against the wooden floor and a haunting scream tears through the air in spite of the tape, and at this Adelaide does gasp, because she doesn't think she's ever heard any sound that carried with it such pure _rage._ The creature's unbridled anger hangs thick in the air, and the hate in its eyes… it's palpable.

"Omnis congregatio et secta diabolica," continues Cody, his voice remaining impressively steady, or at least as far as Adelaide can tell over the enraged screaming. "Ergo, draco—"

His voice breaks as suddenly, the ground beneath them begins to quake. Some of Adelaide's holy water sloshes out of its receptacle as she staggers in place, though she manages to keep her balance, as do the other two. For a moment they can only stare dumbly at the man struggling mightily against his bonds and flinching away from the salt every time he gets too close to it, as he seems utterly unaffected by the madness happening around him. Likely because… he's causing it.

"Cody!" Adelaide urges, and he shakes himself out of his reverie and goes back to his recitation. He hasn't even gotten one word further before something Adelaide can't see shoves her legs back. All thought flies from her head as her body just does its best to minimize the damage: the holy water falls to the floor as her arms fly downward in an attempt to keep her head from cracking against the floor, an attempt that is only moderately successful as she does bang the side of her head against the wood, not as hard as she could have but enough that she sees stars for a moment. Pain flares up in her wrist, but the adrenaline keeps it dulled for the time being.

The building around them is absolutely rattling; she feels it even more as she's stretched out on the floorboards, and just as she looks up, Noah is flung upwards through the air. Not just back—he heads straight for the ceiling twenty feet up, and his trajectory would've taken him straight through that point if it weren't there. But it is, and he connects with the wood with a sickening _crack_ , tearing a scream out of Adelaide, before falling two stories down and landing with a thud in a motionless heap on the floor.

Adelaide's attention is torn from her brother by the sound of something thick ripping apart and she turns to behold the man standing in the middle of the salt circle, duct tape raining like confetti all around him, although a significant amount remains on his clothes and skin. He tears the tape from his mouth and spits out the mouthful of salt, leaving a fair amount stuck to his face and already giving rise to noticeable welts. Wind out of nowhere is picking up around them, threatening the salt circle.

The demon rubs his host's face, eyes ablaze and fixed on Cody, who hasn't stopped reading all the while, and the creature screams, " _Don't you dare read another—_ "

"Te rogamus, audi nos!" Cody cries, and looks up, as the demon's command morphs into a wordless shriek that carries a massive cloud of black smoke out of his mouth. Adelaide instinctively throws her whole body down as it billows upward towards the ceiling. The creature's scream echoes around them, and she covers her head, tears stinging in her eyes.

A _thump_ reaches her, like a body hitting the floor, and suddenly, all is quiet.

She uncovers her eyes, and looks around. A large scorch mark that wasn't there before now mars the ceiling. The man the demon was possessing lies stretched out, motionless, half outside the salt circle. Her eyes come to a rest on Noah, just as still.

She stumbles in his direction, covering her mouth at first, but forsaking that motion as she stretches her hands out towards him. "Noah?" she whispers as she reaches him, but releases a choked sob as she sees that his eyes are open, glassy.

She becomes aware of Walter's voice rising from his phone lying some feet away, tinged with mounting panic, as well as Cody standing still right behind her. All she can do is grasp her brother's shoulders and pull him close, willing him to wake up. But he doesn't.


	21. Report

**AN** : _For the record, I'm not planning on putting too much focus on these OCs; it just seemed more interesting to tell this part of the story from their perspective. Enjoy, and maybe review?_

* * *

Being torn away from his body, even if it wasn't really his, is violation like he's never known. It feels like everything he had is being ripped away from him, but on a physical sense. And he's in his noncorporeal form, a form he's still not really gotten the hang of, being yanked up, up, up, straight through the wood, into the dark sky—and then he plummets downward.

He doesn't even register the shack on the way down, practically immediately it's all just dirt and stone around him, crowding out everything else. It's just darkness, rushing past him faster than anything he's seen, and he can't control his momentum, can't do a damn thing, he's just _falling_ , and worst of all is that he knows where he's falling _to_.

It gets hotter and hotter the further he descends, and he still has no idea how he can feel temperature or really know anything else about his surroundings when he doesn't have a body, but the unbearable heat reaches him all the same.

Likewise, some sensation commensurate to a rush of adrenaline courses through his non-body as he gains speed. If he had anything to influence physically he would be both screaming and bracing himself every second for impact. But all he can do is receive the inexplicable sensations stabbing into him.

All at once, he crashes with as much force as he's ever been able to muster with the Mark and then some, and all goes not black, but red.

* * *

Adelaide hasn't smiled in two days.

Well, Cody hasn't seen much of her in that time, but she always used to smile so often and so vibrantly… the deficiency is noticed. The worst part of all of it was the necessity of covering up the truth, and what they had to do to make the lie believable. Namely, listening through their tears to Walter's instructions, loading Noah's body into the car, driving him to a nearby hiking trail, dropping him over a small cliff—easily the worst part—and calling 911 from there. Walter told them they couldn't bring him all the way home, because the coroner would be able to tell he'd already been dead for over an hour. Neither of them would've thought of that.

They took Adelaide to the hospital to get her wrist looked at. Badly broken. Cody feels guilty for getting out of this without a scratch. He thinks he's distracting himself from the fact that Noah's gone.

The Walshes are falling apart, and why shouldn't they be? When their son, their pride and joy, goes off on a sudden hiking trip with his sister and best friend and doesn't come home again, just because of a little mud and a sudden drop, what else could be expected? The funeral's been scheduled for this weekend. It seems so far away. Endless empty space stretches between them and the event.

Walter blames himself. Of course he does. Even though he couldn't have done a thing to prevent this. They only started hunting because he saved them—not a single thing that's happened has been his fault.

Adelaide, on the other hand, blames the demon.

Cody was over at Walter's house the morning after when Adelaide suddenly turned up at the door, cast on her wrist. As soon as Walter pulled the door open, she said swiftly, "The demon. Emery. Is he dead?"

Walter stood there blinking for a moment, and shook his head. "Demons can't be killed. Only banished. Exorcised. One day, he'll be able to roam the earth again."

"Where is he now?"

He shrugged slightly. "Hell."

Her gaze hardened. "Will he suffer?"

Walter just looked at her for a long time. "Yes."

Dark satisfaction showed in her eyes. She stared down at his welcome mat for a moment. "But not forever," she said.

"Eventually, they always manage to claw their way back up," Walter confirmed. "Just pray that you never have to see him again."

Her expression was so dark, her eyes so empty, Cody had to leave the room.

They live only ten minutes apart, but that was the only time she's been able to get away since it happened. Her family's been staying home, just being with each other. It's just her, her parents, and her twelve-year-old brother now.

Cody's only brother is married and living three states over. The house is generally quiet. For the last couple years his parents have been fine with him leaving the house without telling them where he's going every time, as long as it's within reason, and there are a few stores and the library within walking distance, so it's not difficult to slip out and head next door to spend time with the only person who actually understands what happened to Noah.

Walter's only in his forties, maybe early fifties, and he's in good shape in general, but he has a limp, so it's been a decade since he's done any real hunting, according to him—with the exception of his intervention when Cody brought that spellbook home from a secondhand bookstore he found on vacation in Colorado. His life got really weird really fast, and when he accidentally summoned that spirit just by leaving the book open to a certain page under moonlight, Walter was there just in time to save his life.

Noah was the only other person in the house at the time, and he couldn't keep the secret from Adelaide, or his girlfriend Summer. Cody's pretty sure he never told anyone else; at least, Noah assured him he never did, and Noah's not a great secret keeper but he's no liar.

Was. Was no liar.

Cody knows they need to tell Summer what really happened, eventually. She's called about it more than once. He just can't gather the will to call back.

But this call, this one needs to be made sooner rather than later.

He watches from across Walter's living room as the older man dials in the number he has scratched out in his address book. He sets the phone to speaker and they sit there listening to it ring.

Just when Cody is sure it's about to go to voicemail, a man's voice comes from the phone: " _This is Sam_."

They share a glance. "Sam Winchester?" Walter clarifies.

" _Who's_ _asking_?"

"My name's Walter Graham. I heard from Robert Groesbeck that you've been looking for a demon with an immunity to devil's traps. That sound about right?"

" _Yes_." The voice has turned slightly frantic, but in a controlled manner.

"I'm retired, I wasn't there, but I've got a younger hunter right here who may've found it."

" _Put him on_ ," Sam's voice comes without hesitation.

Cody stands and takes a few steps forward, closing the distance between him and the phone. "I'm here, sir."

" _Tell me what happened_."

He's not messing around. His voice is deadly serious. Cody swallows, wondering what this demon did to him. It had to have been something horrible. Probably at least as bad as what it did to them while bound and covered in sigils and salt. "M-my friend Noah met the demon by chance in a bar this past Friday night," he begins. "Introduced himself as Emery. Noah said he noticed how he grimaced when he saw Noah's cross necklace, so Noah intentionally used God's name in vain, and he flinched. Left immediately after that. Noah tried following him but lost him on the highway after a long drive. So we—um, Noah, Noah's sister Adelaide, and I spent all weekend driving around the area looking for signs of demonic activity or the car that Emery was driving."

" _What kind of car?_ " Sam's voice is tinged with desperation.

"Noah said it was an Impala. Black. I forget the year…"

" _1967?_ " and now his voice is shaking.

"Yeah, that sounds right." Cody pauses, giving Sam an opportunity to ask more questions. But there's silence on the other end, so he goes on, "Anyway, it was definitely providence that let us find it, but Adelaide actually passed the car just as it was leaving a house in a remote neighborhood, y'know the ones with the houses really far apart? Noah and I were driving in my car not too far away, she called us for backup, and well, we found a woman tied up in the shed behind the house. All things considered, she wasn't too banged up, mostly just malnourished and exhausted, but also very very scared. She was pretty hysterical so we didn't question her too much, but we did get a brief description that confirmed that the man who took her was the same man Noah met."

" _What was the description?_ "

"Um, tall, tan, light brown hair. Muscular. Brown eyes, I think."

There's a pause. Cody thinks he hears a long, soft intake of breath. " _There's more. You actually came face to face with him. You stayed, didn't you? You stayed and drew a devil's trap._ "

"Um, yeah. Well, first I drove the woman to the nearest hospital and dropped her off at the front door before going straight back. We painted a devil's trap on the ceiling of the shed, waited for another hour, and then confronted Emery when he came in, after he got caught in the trap. Or at least he looked like he was caught. Looked like he couldn't leave." Cody roughly rubs his face. "But after we came out, he managed to do just that. So I panicked, and I whacked him over the head with my gun.

"While he was out cold, we tied him up good with everything we had—mostly devil's trap duct tape that Walter gave us. And we drew a salt circle. And I started reading an exorcism."

" _You exorcised him?_ " Cody is startled, because in Sam's voice there is suddenly a mixture of panic and anger that Cody can't reconcile.

"Um…" That's the gist. And he doesn't particularly want to recount the rest of what happened to a stranger on the phone. "Yeah. We did. He woke up during it but we got the job done."

" _Oh my God_."

Cody looks at Walter, who's still holding the phone and returns his glance, an equally confused look sitting upon his face. "That a bad thing?" he cuts in.

Silence on the other end, except the faint sound of heavy breathing. Then, " _When did this happen?_ "

"T-two days ago," Cody answers hesitantly.

" _Two frigging days? Why did you wait this long to call?_ "

"We've had a funeral to arrange," Walter says curtly.

Another pause, this one shorter but filled with no sound at all. " _He killed someone?_ "

"He killed Noah," Cody whispers.

Sam's this close to hyperventilating. His breathing's gotten more and more irregular as the call has continued. "You okay?" Walter asks, not looking particularly sympathetic.

" _No, yes, I'm… I'm sorry for your loss._ " He's immensely distracted; that much is obvious. " _Where did this happen, exactly? I see from your area code you're somewhere in West Virginia._ "

He's good. "Morgantown," Walter affirms.

" _Okay. He was in Morgantown, two days ago, and now he's in hell._ " He sounds like he's talking to himself more than anyone else. " _Any idea why he had that girl tied up?_ "

"All we got from her was a description of the demon's host, sir," Cody answers. "And that's not even relevant anymore."

" _Did you get her name?_ "

"Oh, well um, yeah, her first name was Harper. Don't know about a last name."

"Do you know why this demon is immune to devil's traps, Sam?" asks Walter, his voice somewhat calculating. He's suspicious. Cody gets why, but he's not about to go questioning a Winchester so brazenly.

There's a pause on Sam's end. " _I do, but I'm going to keep it to myself. Trust me, though, this demon is the only one of his kind. Look—what's your name, kid?_ "

"Cody Burke."

" _Walter and Cody. If either of you catch wind of this demon again, I want you to call me immediately. Don't hesitate for a second. If he's right in front of you, the best thing you can do is get me on the phone. Give me your exact location if you can. Tell, uh, Adelaide too. Okay?_ "

"No promises for extreme circumstances like that, but we'll make an effort," says Walter.

" _I'm dead serious. It's the course of action that gives you the best chances of survival._ "

Walter raises an eyebrow, but he says, "All right, all right."

Another short pause, and then the hesitant question: " _Was the host still alive?_ "

"No," says Cody, and his voice breaks unexpectedly. He does his best to clear his throat before going on, "He was dead. Walter called an associate of his to go pick up the body and burn it after we left."

" _Right._ " He's speaking in a rush now. " _I gotta go. Make some calls, do some research. Thank you for contacting me. You've been more helpful than you can possibly know._ "

A click rises from the phone, and the call is dropped.

Walter slides the device into his pocket, shaking his head slowly. "He sounds extremely personally invested in this hunt. That's always dangerous."

"I don't get it," Cody says dubiously. "We sent the thing to hell. Isn't that the best that can be done? Why's he still after it?"

Walter shrugs. "He's a Winchester. He knows a lot of things most hunters don't. Still, though… in this case, I'd like to know too."


	22. Knowing

**AN** : _Shoutout to freetobescary for his/her kind review. Many thanks for your feedback, sir/ma'am._

* * *

Sam immediately starts dialing after ending the call. Cas is sitting on the couch adjacent to his, obviously still reeling from the news, so Sam says swiftly, "We gotta tell Crowley."

Cas tilts his head, blinking. Processing. "Sam, are you sure that's wise?"

"I… Dammit Cas, this is the only thing we can try, all right? He's on Crowley's turf now. If we don't call, we might as well just sit here with our thumbs up our asses waiting for, I don't even know, for Crowley to find Cain and have him kill him, or for him to crawl out of the pit again, which could take months." Sam's finger pauses, trembling over the phone. "Or… or we could go in after him."

"Follow him into hell?" asks Cas immediately. "How?"

Sam's face falls. "You've done it before," he says desperately. "You saved him from hell all that time ago."

Cas shakes his head. "That was a combined effort. I could not do it on my own. And that was when we all had wings."

Sam groans. "Okay, well, I've been to hell on a covert mission, when I freed Bobby's soul. Part of the trials. Got a lift from a reaper, who took me to purgatory and directed me to a back door into hell. Maybe Eloise knows the same way?"

Cas blinks. Sam knows how it sounds. Their lives are so weird. "Okay," the angel says presently. "Except neither of us is in any shape to undertake such a mission."

Sam stares angrily down at his legs. "You're right," he admits. "I couldn't even go. You could, but if you were caught it would be the end. You can't fight. Best case scenario'd be whoever finds you takes you to Crowley instead of killing you, but then he'd be, at the very least, suspicious. It would defeat the entire purpose. Maybe Eloise will be willing to go?"

Cas shakes his head. "She's a reaper, Sam. Non-interference is their policy. They can't even enter heaven or hell."

Sam drops the phone into his lap and just places his face in his hands for a long moment.

Dean is in hell.

Again.

Back when he sold his soul, when he spent every day trying to distract himself from how little time he had left before he had to go… before he was torn to shreds by invisible beasts, and then the real torment began… this is the exact thing he was so terrified of. Of becoming one of the very monsters he'd spent his life hunting. And thank _God_ that didn't come to be, but it was not without a price. He did his time, and took on scars that would last through a lifetime of terrors. The years he spent in hell never really left him.

Oh God.

He's _back there_.

Sam still carries the dim memory of something that Meg said during her stint in his body, that hell is "like hell, even for demons." He just… he just doesn't know what this will do to Dean. If—when they bring him back home, and back to himself, will he be sporting new traumas from hell?

Does it really matter, piled in with all the other traumas he's undergone as a result of that damned mark?

If only Sam had been there. If only he'd have known. He would have stopped Dean from taking on the Mark, without a doubt. Killing Abaddon wasn't worth this. Not even close.

And it's not just the fact that he's back in hell, although that alone would be quite enough. No, it's that the thing that put him there was an _exorcism_. Dean has now experienced being _exorcised_. Like a common monster.

His brother has now been hunted, in the same way that he used to hunt.

His brother… is a monster.

"Sam." Cas's voice reaches him like they're underwater. Presently he realizes how erratically he's breathing. He closes his eyes, trying to calm himself. Maybe if he just… just clears his mind…

It's not that in recent weeks, his meditation methods have become ineffective, but when he does sit down to clear out his head, he finds himself in an emptiness that's much darker than it used to be.

He shakes his head, feels his lips forming the words "I'm fine," though he's not sure they make it out into the open air. Eventually, though, he opens his eyes, and the immediate horror of the situation grows duller as he distances himself from it.

He releases a long, soft sigh, and refocuses his eyes on the phone in his hand. "I'm gonna call," he says tiredly, and Cas doesn't make a move or say a word to stop him as he dials in the short number.

The phone rings three times before it stops and Crowley's voice rises from the speaker, " _Crowley, King of Hell. If the purpose of this call is to whine about your brother, kindly go screw yourself. Otherwise, leave a message._ "

Sam sighs in frustration as the phone beeps, and he starts right in: "Crowley, pick up the damn phone, it's important. We know where Dean is and we need your help. Call me." He presses END CALL and drops the phone onto the cushion beside him in favor of immediately resting his forehead in his hand.

"Don't want to be more specific?" Cas inquires.

"No," Sam says flatly, eyes closed. "If I'm telling him at all, I'm telling _him_ , not an answering machine."

"When's the last time he acknowledged a message you left?"

Sam shakes his head, taking his hand down. "Before we lost the spell. We shouldn't count on him getting back to us."

For a long moment Cas just nods, apparently deep in thought. "So what now? Shall we call Eloise?"

"Yeah," Sam says. "Maybe she can find the girl who Dean—" He stops short. "At least she can bring us the Impala, I bet. I'll text the number that just called and ask for a specific address. Probably should've thought of that earlier."

"You have a lot on your plate," Cas tries.

"I don't need you to be conciliatory, Cas," Sam says flatly. "Bring me my computer, would you? I'll start reading up on news in Morgantown and the surrounding areas while you talk to Eloise."

Everything about life in general these days is still weighing him down, but damn does it feel good to have something to work with after all this time.


	23. Arrival

He wakes up being accosted by sensations that he can't explain. Something similar to heat, something similar to pain, all manner of shades and degrees in between and around, but none of it quite feels _real_.

He groans, dragging his hands up from his sides to press down on the top of his head, which is, as far as he can describe, throbbing. The ground beneath him is either hot or cold, he can't tell and he's not sure he remembers the difference. He feels the dankness of the area in his bones, and he hears distant dripping and the faint crackle of torches, but he doesn't raise his head. He doesn't feel able.

It takes what has to be at least several minutes for him to gather the wherewithal and indeed the strength even to move. He pushes himself up, and upon seeing his arms he immediately notes the familiarity of them, of the clothes he wears—the same outfit he had on the last time he was in his body.

He looks how he did as a human.

He sits up suddenly, and it hurts, but he's not sure why, or why he's back in his body, or… much of anything. He's in a drafty cell made of stone, with bars all across the wall in front of him, through which there appears to be a hallway. But it doesn't matter. He stares down at his legs, taking in his jeans, his boots, the curve of his legs under the clothes. Wondering why he can't exactly feel them. Or his arms. Or his headache. Or anything at all. And yet at the same time… there is a deep pain that flares up in his core, aching and stabbing and burning and freezing all at once, and he clutches at his chest, breathing ragged.

"You new?" comes a voice from off to the side.

He whips his head in its direction but sees only a wall. The voice seems to have come from the next cell over. Grimacing, he hauls himself to his feet and stumbles towards the bars, reaching out to give them a good shake. They seem pretty sturdy.

The Mark is still with him, though. Surely he can bust them wide open.

He tries to ask, "How the hell would you know that?" but it comes out as a gasp, hoarse and guttural. It's strange to feel his own voice in his throat again.

He's been comfortably distancing himself from the time he spent in this body, and he's not sure he appreciates it being back.

"Way you're breathin'. Ya get used to this feeling, eventually."

"That so?" he breathes, grasping at his heart. The seconds tick by and no response comes from next door. He examines the bars, testing the strength of each, and tries asking, though his voice still prickles mightily in his throat, "You a veteran here?"

"I been 'round the block a few times."

Probably a demon, then. Rather than a still-human soul in the process of demonization. He grasps a pair of bars next to each other that seem frailer than the rest. "What part of hell is this, exactly? How does this whole thing work?"

A sardonic chuckle rises from behind the wall. "I ain't your damn tour guide, boy."

The fun way, then. With a sudden twist of his arms, he easily snaps the bars in his hands, one piece coming away entirely such that he immediately recognizes it as a potential weapon. He swings it downward through the rest of the bars, creating an opening large enough for him to step through and raining scraps of metal all over the stone floor.

A startled "What the hell?" comes from the side, and he immediately heads on over, still brandishing the jagged piece of his bar. The cell next to his contains a middle-aged Asian man with a thick head of greying hair and dressed in what Dean would guess to be somewhat dated clothing, though he's not so familiar with the history of oriental fashion. He scrambles to the back of his cell, watching Dean with wide black eyes. "How did you do that?" he asks, perplexed.

By way of answer, Dean easily pries apart the bars to the man's cell, the power now coursing through him. "I'll be the one to ask the questions," he says, approaching rapidly and holding the bar to the man's throat. "See, I may be new, but I too have been around the block once or twice. We can do this the easy way or the fun way. You'll talk either way."

"That doesn't make any sense," the man spits.

Dean shrugs. "You wanna bet?"

The man seems to consider his options, and eventually asks, "What do you want to know?"

Hm. Good question. He starts with, "How do I have my old body back?"

He pulls a face, leading Dean to believe this is very basic information. "Does it feel like you have a body? You don't. You're a spirit. We all are, except some of the higher ups who are able to bring their hosts down here with them. After a while you learn how to manipulate how you appear as a spirit, but at first you just look the way you did when you died."

Dean turns this information over for a few moments before he suddenly grasps at his chest again with one hand, the pain climbing into sharper focus in the lull. "What is this that I'm feeling?" he demands.

Again the man shakes his head in disbelief at his ignorance, but he says after a moment of thought, "Whenever we're not being actively torn apart, we all feel the exact same thing. Because we have no bodies. We just feel… hell. It's all that holds us together."

That explains why it's new. The first time he was here, he was _always_ being torn apart. There was never any respite. He recalls what that demon said about how things have crumbled under Crowley's rule. "All right. So you're a demon. How do things work for us?"

"Not much differently than how they work for the condemned souls that are still somewhat human. Sometimes torturers pull you out to have some fun, but for the most part you're left to rot. If you show promise or if there's a need, sometimes you get singled out and given an opportunity to have position. Tormenter, crossroads demon, underling of the king." He shakes his head. "Considering how many of us there are, the number is infinitesimally tiny."

All right, enough of this. He doesn't plan on letting it be relevant anyway. "How do you get out?"

"Some say there are secret ways. Strength of will works too. The longer you stay, the worse the pain is, the easier it is to get out. Don't ask me why, it's just how it works. Not something I can really explain or even demonstrate."

Dean narrows his eyes, evaluating the man, but he seems truthful and doesn't really have motive to lie. "Where's Crowley?"

"How should I know?" he scoffs. "I've just been in this cell for decades now, since I was last exorcised."

Decades… that's right. One month out there, ten years in here. "You know where we are?"

He shakes his head. "It's all a maze. Nobody knows all the paths through hell, probably not even the king."

Dean glances behind him, at the massive rift in the cell door. "There any kind of patrols through here?"

"Nothing regularly scheduled. Sometimes there are two in one day, sometimes weeks of silence pass."

The pain tearing at his core, while forming it at the same time, is something he wants to put behind him as quickly as possible. Of course it is. But at the same time… he may not have another opportunity to catch Crowley by surprise for a long, long time. That is, assuming he can. "How does exorcism work? Is there any record of the demons that arrive down here?"

"I don't think so," says the demon. "You get dropped into a random empty cell and nobody ever formally acknowledges your arrival."

So Crowley probably doesn't know that he's here.

Deciding he's gotten all the information he needs for now, Dean turns and leaves the cell without another word. He steps outside, looking to his left and right. On either side the stone hallway filled with prison cells on one side stretches endlessly, torches spaced far apart on the walls, with long dark patches in between. Nobody is in sight, but he hears distant moaning and babbling issuing from unseen cells.

Twirling the bar in his hand, whistling a sprightly tune, Dean starts walking.


	24. Wandering

**AN** : _So, I've tried my best to revive the story something fierce to make up for the five and a half-month silence. I've posted seven chapters in the last two weeks and have received very little response, so I guess I lost most of my readers with the long hiatus. Pretty discouraging, honestly. If you are still reading, let me know, but otherwise I'll go back to posting when inspiration strikes, and I can't make any promises as to how often that will happen._

* * *

Inside an hour, Eloise delivers the Impala back to her usual place outside the bunker and tells them she's found Harper Grace Quinn, a 31-year-old bartender who turned up after a four-day disappearance sporting various wounds and some obvious psychological trauma. Eloise offers to take one or both of them to see her, and Sam instantly agrees, with Cas following shortly after.

Their appearance between cars in the West Virginia hospital parking lot marks the first time Sam has been outside in weeks. Almost instinctively, he draws in a deep breath of the fresh air, and in turn wobbles dangerously on his crutches, and Cas immediately grasps his arm. With his help Sam manages to steady himself, and looks around. Eloise is nowhere to be seen. He can only assume she'll be ready to take them back home when they're done here.

They manage to make it inside the building without mishap, the receptionist gives them the room number, they head for the elevator, and presently they reach their destination and find the door shut tight.

Cas knocks three times and stands back, waiting. After a long pause, a woman opens the door. She's beautiful, or at least it's obvious that she usually is—right now her long blonde hair is in disarray and dark shadows weigh down the skin under her eyes. She's thoroughly covered in scratches and bruises and bandages.

Sam balks at the sight, and has to stop himself from covering his mouth—not that that would even be easy with crutches.

"Harper Quinn?" Cas asks.

The woman glances warily back and forth between them. "Who are you?" she whispers.

"My name is Sam, and this is Cas," Sam says. There's no space here for lies, no time to mess things up if she catches on or even gets a little suspicious. "We've been chasing the guy—" He swallows. "—the _thing_ that did this to you. We have some questions, and we're offering answers in exchange."

Her face drops, expression becoming strangely blank. "You… you don't think I'm crazy?"

"We know you're not," Sam assures her. He looks down, and pointedly waves one of his crutches in a slight motion. "We've encountered him before."

Hope lights her eyes, and she stands aside, though the movement leads her to wince. "Please, come in."

* * *

He wishes he could teleport. He's been getting pretty good at it, but not good enough to land somewhere he's never seen and doesn't even know the location of in relation to where he's coming from. Hell, that might not even be possible.

The walk is endless. He never spots anyone else out and about. Occasionally he stops and pulls out souls whose clothing indicates that they died a long, long time ago, and interrogates them. He never garners any new information.

Fairly frequently he stops in random cells to practice his abilities on their occupants, and then seals them back up on leaving. He's always proud to hear the whimpering he leaves behind him.

He tries to keep track of where he's been by making scratches at regular intervals on the walls, but after quite some time passes without him ever passing by such marks again, he gives up. It takes too much time, with little chance of payoff. His best bet is just to find somebody who does know where they're going.

Weeks pass like this. Then months, or at least that's what he'd guess. He's not sure, and there's no way to track the passage of time. The itch burns more and more in the back of his mind as he goes longer and longer without killing, but he has no way to, down here. Fortunately, not having a body offsets the symptoms significantly. It's more a distraction than a detriment.

He steadily improves on the latest ability he's been working on, and probably the most complex thus far: mind reading. For the first several months, he can't see past their current emotions if they're too strong, and then when he does manage to break through them he can only read the thoughts currently going through their heads. But hey, it's a hell of a lot more than he used to be able to do.

He also always leaves his victims severely shaken after the experience. That, he doesn't mind.

After a while, though, he starts figuring out how to root through minds. How to observe a mangled ball of thoughts and feelings and memories from the outside and zero in on what he wants to know. As soon as this ability is moderately usable, he starts trying to find paths through hell in the minds of the prisoners he stops in to practice on. But none of them seem to know anything. They've been in their respective cells for longer than they can recall.

Considering the fact that he hasn't come across a single soul roaming the halls apart from himself, this shouldn't be surprising. But once he finally does find someone, at least he has a plan to immediately start on the path to finding Crowley from there.

* * *

"So you're saying I was kidnapped by… by a demon," Harper says, her voice shaking, wringing her hands in her lap like she was the entire time they were talking. "And… now it's back in hell."

They're seated in the two chairs by her bedside, and Sam got uncomfortable a while ago with his legs spread out like this, but with the many wounds of a perfectly innocent woman on full display right in front of him, he doesn't complain, not even to himself.

"That about sums it up," he affirms.

She looks up. "A demon," she repeats, dazed, and pauses. "Which one?"

They glance at each other. "A new one," Cas answers. "He hasn't been around long enough for his exploits to be known to you. His name is… Emery."

Sam looks away. He keeps doing that.

"Harper," and Cas finally says the words Sam has been putting off the whole time, even though it's the reason they're here: "Tell us what happened. What did he do to you?"

She shakes her head, biting her lip for a moment. "I thought he was just a guy in a bar," she says, voice wobbling. A tear runs down her face and she wipes it away with the back of her hand.

Sam fixes his gaze on the corner of the room.

"The bar where you work?" Cas asks. She nods. A moment of silence, and he presses, "You got in a car with him?'

She shakes her head vigorously. "No, I… I met him outside the bar after my shift ended. The parking lot was pretty deserted… We talked for a few minutes. I thought we'd arrange to meet up another time, it was late. But he wanted me to come home with him. And when I wouldn't bite he knocked me over the head. Next thing I knew I was…" She wraps her arms around herself, shuddering.

"It's okay," Cas encourages gently. Sam is so glad he's here, because he feels even less able to talk than Harper is. "Next thing you knew?"

Eventually she's able to complete the sentence: "I was tied up in a chair in a shed. He was sitting across the room… sharpening a knife… and…" She shakes her head, pressing her hand against her mouth. "I thought he would… But he didn't. He left me there for the next two days, hardly even touching me, but when he got frustrated he'd…" Tears stream down her face steadily now.

"Would you excuse me for a moment?" Sam says abruptly, his voice shuddering, as he lurches forward into his crutches, narrowly avoiding falling as he quickly stands and begins hobbling towards the door. He can't do this. He just can't. He'll be even worse than useless if he starts breaking down in front of this woman.

The only sound left in his wake is Harper's soft whimpering. Cas doesn't try to stop him. With some effort, he pushes the door open. It slams shut behind him louder than he expected, but he's too wrapped up in trying to breathe properly to be bothered.

He drops himself into one of the chairs right outside the room and brushes away a nurse who approaches to ask him how he's doing, and then just sits there with his eyes shut for a long moment, trying to clear out his head.

"You wish you could tell them," comes a voice from next to him, and almost in the same moment he jumps out of his skin, sees who it is, and bites back an expletive.

Sitting calmly in the chair beside his, staring off into the middle distance, Eloise continues, "You wish you could say, 'He is not what you think he is.' But then, you realize, you'd be taking the side of a monster. And maybe he wasn't always a monster, and maybe it isn't his fault that he is now. But it doesn't matter, not really."

Sam has never felt heavier, or weaker. "I just want him back," he whispers.

"I'm sorry," she says, and her voice is somehow perfectly neutral and deeply sad at once.

Sam leans over and buries his face in his hands.

They stay like this for several minutes, stretching out into an eternity. Sam just tries to block out all the voices in his head. More and more of them have slipped into hopelessness in recent weeks.

He can't even hear Dean's voice anymore, telling him to keep trucking.

If Dean could talk to him right now, he'd be telling him to switch gears from trying to cure him to trying to end him.

"If we do cure Cain," he finally says, still not lifting his head, "what… what do you think he'll do?"

She is silent for several moments. He sneaks a glance at her, but her expression is impassive. Finally she says frankly, "If we do revive the mortal man within him, that man will be profoundly disturbed. He may never recover from the many ages he spent as a monster. I expect he will spend many years, perhaps all his life, in solitude."

Dean's time as a demon hasn't been anywhere near comparable to Cain's, but the response is like a punch in the gut.

He feels Eloise look at him, for the first time. "Sam," she says, "he is deeply fortunate to have you."

He looks up, but at the same moment, the door opens, and Sam almost tries jumping to his feet, but he remembers just in time that that's not the safest option. Cas steps outside, looking extremely grave.

"Give it to me straight," Sam says, trying to keep his voice even. Trying to pretend he's in better shape than he was when he left the room.

"He was testing his powers on her," Cas says flatly, clinically. "Trying to learn to control her, to read her, to move her. Lying dormant within him is practically every ability you've ever seen a demon use. It seems he struggled greatly for the first two days, at which point he made some kind of breakthrough. Most of her wounds are from those two days, though. From when he became… angry."

Sam breathes out shakily. The farther Dean gets from what he was—in terms of power, morality, and everything in between—the more of an adjustment becoming himself again will be… the less like himself he'll ever be able to be again.

The more he'll need them.

"Let's go home," he says tiredly.


	25. Finding

**AN** : _Thanks for the reviews, and for understanding. You guys rock._

* * *

When he turns a corner and sees a guy at the end of the hall, way too far away to jump, he immediately steps backwards, praying (to whom, he has no idea) that he didn't see him.

He waits for several long seconds, not breathing, and finally, footsteps come into audible range. They don't sound rushed. The guy will be surprised.

The moment something starts to come around the corner, Dean throws himself forward, barreling into a pasty guy with pale blue eyes who lets out an alarmed yelp as he's crushed for a moment under Dean.

Except _dammit_ , this guy feels _solid_ , he has a _body_. Dean's not sure it's enough to tip the scales, but it's definitely a disadvantage on his part.

So before he can move a muscle or say a word, Dean clamps his hand down over the guy's forehead, and immediately starts feeling around.

Fairly quickly he comes upon a view of the tunnel from what appears to be the guy's perspective. He rewinds it, as quickly as he can, because the guy is beginning to gather himself enough to struggle under Dean's grip. Apparently he can't teleport. Dean's not even gonna question that.

The path is long, and sinuous, and for several seconds as he watches it unfold Dean wonders how he's going to remember all the turns. But it turns out not to be as long as he feared when it turns abruptly into a wall, slides rapidly down through the darkness for a few seconds, and after a few more chambers ends up in what is very obviously a dark, dank throne room.

Figures that hell would be full of secret passageways.

Armed with all he needed, Dean has one moment of panic as he tries to figure out what to do with this guy that will prevent him from going back to Crowley. And suddenly, he remembers the sure weakness of having a body, the one that screwed him over and ultimately landed him down here.

One good punch, and the guy is out like a light. Dean places his hand on his forehead again and concentrates deeply. He's been experimenting with taking away demonic abilities for a brief period of time, so he _could_ make an attempt to eliminate this guy's teleporting, but the best way to eliminate him as a problem would be to kill him. Without Ruby's knife, an impossible feat.

Or at least, it used to be.

His success rate hasn't exactly been high, and so far he's done very little practicing on higher-level demons, but maybe… just maybe…

He doesn't know how long he spends kneeling over the body, ignoring the sounds in the cells around him, just focusing as hard as he can. Concentrating all his power into one part of his form—the palm pressed against the demon's forehead.

When he's not sure how he can possibly gather up any more, he pushes that power downward.

The guy's eyes fly open, and he instinctively gasps for air, but none is able to enter. His entire skeleton lights up orange, and Dean grins in wild delight as that light flickers and slowly dies.

Prying open a nearby cell, tossing the body in, and closing it back up is quick business. For a long moment after he steps back, he just stares down at his hands, flexing them, thinking how maybe being trapped in hell was the best thing that could've happened to him. Time is expanded to a ridiculous degree around here, there are no regulations, and he has an endless supply of demons and souls to practice his abilities on.

It does nothing to lessen his outrage at the people who sent him down here, but still.

Shaking his head in something close to disbelief at his luck, he starts striding down the hall along the path he saw in the demon's mind, soon coming to the wall the path went right through. It's in a blind spot, out of the sight of any nearby cells.

For a moment he just surveys the wall, eyebrow raised. At first it looks like a pretty ordinary stone wall, but after a few seconds of inspection he finds the long creases signaling the presence of a wide door.

He places his hand against it, experimenting, and pushes.

It spins like a revolving door, and he quickly slips through. In the moment the torchlight outside illumines the interior, he can see a space of about ten square feet that's flat before the pathway disappears down what appears to be a long stairway.

Then the door shuts, and he is left in total darkness.

He stands still for several seconds, and starts cautiously forward, feeling around with his foot before he puts any weight down. The glimpse of the space the torchlight afforded him was enough that when the floor does drop, he's not surprised by it.

The descent into darkness is rather uneventful. He goes as fast as he can, but still with caution, knowing that while he'll be completely unharmed even if he does trip and plummet head over heels down the steps, it could lose him the element of surprise.

After a while he senses… something, coming up ahead. He advances slowly, and finds that the floor has stopped dropping with every step, and not only has it leveled out, but when he puts his hands out in front of him, they are met with a stone wall. He blinks, surprised. Does he have some kind of darksense? Something that lets him see without light? A question for later.

He feels around the wall and quickly finds a crease just like the one before. Before he pushes, he stops for a moment, listening, feeling for what—and more importantly, who—lies beyond the stone. As far as he can tell, the chambers stand deserted. That's good, and not too surprising—as far as he's heard, Crowley's not exactly been commissioning frequent meetings. He has no plans, no business to attend to. Dean has to question just what he spends his days doing.

He reviews the plan that he's created over the many months he's been wandering. It's really not much of one, but it's all he's got. The version that stems from nobody being around still could branch off into a couple different subsections, depending on what he actually finds as he spends more time down here.

Of course, he'd be a fool to forget the one piece of advice given to him shortly before he was yanked down here.

" _His mother, this Scottish witch called Rowena…_ "

From what that demon told him, this witch is just manipulating Crowley for her own purposes. So his next move will depend on how well that's going. If Crowley is decidedly under her thumb and she's basically running things through him, it will make things much more difficult for him. If she's hit a road block early on, he can use that to his advantage. Either way, having a conversation with her is perhaps the most important item on his agenda right now. But he has to catch her at a time when Crowley is not present.

Which could get… annoying.

He's been trying to tweak the appearance of his spirit, as the first demon he spoke to here suggested he could, but he hasn't yet figured out how to make any substantial progress, at least to the point of unrecognizability. Or if he has, he can't tell, because he hasn't seen his own reflection since he was shoved down here. So, it's conceivable that he could hide away in one of the throne room-adjacent chambers for a very long time without anyone entering, but it can't go on indefinitely, and he needs to have a plan for if he has to explain his presence. At least appearing to be wearing a black suit would be helpful—then all he really needs is confidence, and nobody's going to question him. But he hasn't been able to hack it.

He's not gonna learn anything new just standing here. Gathering himself up, he pushes ever so slightly on the door, opening it up just a crack for him to peek through.

Things seem completely dead on the other side of the door. He sees only a system of stone walls and no demons to speak of. Deciding to risk it, he pushes the wall all the way open and it begins to spin slowly. He quickly sidesteps over to the nearest corner to hide himself behind, but no noise comes to him except for the echo of his own footfalls. Which must sound suspicious, the way they stop and start.

So he resolves to just walk with confidence and regularity through the chambers. At least nobody will find any cause for suspicion until they see him.

Walking so conspicuously in such a dangerous environment gives the chambers the appearance of flying by as he strides through them. He doesn't encounter another soul. Very soon he comes upon a door, which he presses his ear against for several long seconds. Hearing nothing, he pulls it slightly open and peers through.

Across the room a small ginger woman sits up straight on what is obviously a throne. She's clothed in a simple long black dress, her curly red hair spilling down her back. Her movements seem almost guilty, as she's caught lounging on the throne when she so clearly shouldn't have been.

She's no demon.

He steps into the room, letting the door shut behind him.


	26. Deal

The place is completely deserted except for the woman in the throne. Various tables and chairs stand about, and chains hang from the walls, but it's just a miscellaneous assortment of items. There's no telling how much of it is even in use. The torchlight all around is reflected in the various small puddles gathered on the floor. The place is, to say the least, not impressive.

The woman seems to have relaxed a bit upon seeing him, as she probably would've with anyone who wasn't Crowley, if he were to hazard a guess. He creeps forward, not quite standing at his full height, looking around, taking in the details of the room.

"Yes?" she asks after a long lull, sounding annoyed. "Did you have something to tell me?"

She has a Scottish accent.

He looks her up and down, and all the while she's just glaring at him in disdain. Finally he ventures to ask, "Rowena?"

She quirks an eyebrow. "And you are?"

Already she seems very much like the type of self-seeking bitch who would keep any development of any kind to herself to come up with the best ways to exploit it for her own gain before dreaming of telling anyone else. She also seems like she's probably good at picking up on deceit. So he feels it is very much his safest option to candidly respond, "My name's Dean Winchester."

Her eyes widen, and she stands up—revealing herself to be even more petite than he'd thought. "You're Dean Winchester?" she asks, surveying him from head to toe as he was just doing with her.

"The one and only."

She looks at him askance, or at least pretends to. "The king's been looking for you."

He cocks his head, a light smirk playing at his lips. "The king, your son?"

She narrows her eyes, clearly uncertain of what he's hinting at. "That's the one."

He's gotta play this carefully. He shakes his head, the picture of casualness. "Yeah, not a huge fan of him, gotta say. _Insanely_ clingy. Can't even imagine what it must be like to be his mother. How is it that he ever leaves your side?"

Her eyes are still just as narrow, her brow furrowed. She's not biting. "What're you playing at?" she asks slowly.

Dean holds up his hands. "Nothing. I'm just saying, the guy's needy. Lonely, I guess. Kinda pathetic. I swear, when I left his employ it was like the breakup scene in a friggin' rom com. Although, let me tell you, I don't see the traditionally inevitable 'getting back together' happening this time."

She raises an eyebrow. "So then what are you doing here?"

Fortunately she seems utterly unaffected by his jabs at her son. He didn't feel like he was taking much of a risk with that. "He has something of mine. Or at least he knows where it is. I'm here to get it back."

A slight smirk finally graces her lips, lifting the perpetually suspicious look she's been wearing. "And you think he's going to hand it over?"

He shrugs. "If he knows what's good for him." And he waits. He's taking a huge risk with this, and he's realizing that more and more with each passing second. He knows what he wants from her. He's just not sure if there's anything that she'll want from him.

Rowena surveys him for a long, long moment, tilting her head and pursing her lips in thoughtfulness. "What is it that he took from you?"

A little bit of discretion here can't hurt. "A weapon. A very special weapon, that very much belongs to me."

She nods, her expression not changing, for another long stretch. Finally, she leans back against the throne and says, "Well, Dean Winchester, the king _is_ my son, and he'd very much like to know where you are."

He scowls. "Like I said: clingy."

"And I ought to alert him quite immediately of your presence here," she continues.

He opens his arms in a gesture meant to be disarming. "Look, I got no beef with you, lady." Maybe he's being too easygoing. Why would he waltz in here and have such an open conversation with her if he weren't planning something? "But if you make a move to do that, I _will_ rip your heart out through your throat."

He needs an impassive reaction, and thank goodness that's exactly what he gets. "Ooh, I believe you." There's that pensive expression again as she evaluates him. And after several seconds, she pushes herself back to a fully upright position and begins to close the distance between them. "But you won't."

He quirks an eyebrow. "I won't?"

She smiles. "No. I'm not going to call my son, Dean Winchester, because you are going to stay right here and greet him when he comes back."

He frowns. That was the fake plan anyway.

But she's not finished. "And you are going to beg to be let back into his service."

He blinks. He's not sure what he expected, but it certainly wasn't that. "Um… yeah, and why exactly would I do that?"

"Because," and her smile deepens, as she reaches forward to smooth over a ruffle on the shoulder of his shirt, just to show how unafraid she is, "I can find what you're looking for."

 _Bingo_.

But it's in his best interest to act surprised, so again he blinks, expression dropping off his face, and just stares at her. Giving her plenty of silence to fill with more words.

After another smirk she steps away, beginning to circle him slowly to continue her evaluation. He stands still as she drawls, "I'm a witch, darling. A locating spell? Piece of cake. Now, it might take some time, but I can get you what you're looking for, and you'll never have to ask my son direct."

Admittedly, he's still not quite following. "And the thing you want in exchange is… for me to work for him?"

"No." She comes to stand in front of him again, and fixes him with an intense stare. "The thing I want in exchange is for you to betray him."

He barely manages to stop himself from laughing out loud. Oh, this just got _interesting._ He gives her a long sidelong look. "You're as much a fan of him as I am, I gather?"

She places her hand over her heart in an affronted gesture that he's not sure whether or not is meant to be sarcastic. "Oh, exactly the opposite! You are right, he is far too preoccupied with finding you, and I worry for him. If you come back to him, if you're genuine enough, he will welcome you back. It will take emotional subterfuge to finally get him to refocus himself, and stop being so distracted."

Dean is slowly beginning to understand that her obvious attempts to insinuate herself into Crowley's circle of trust… have not been as successful as she might've hoped. She wants him to drive her son straight into her arms.

Like that demon said… a manipulative bitch.

Absolutely perfect.

"So, one betrayal for one locating spell," he summarizes.

"You keep up the ruse of working for him for as long as it takes me to prepare the spell. Then I perform the spell, you stab him in the back, and I give you the location on your way out."

He cocks his head. "How literal stabbing are we talking here?"

"Not at all," she says, tone suddenly severe. "You are not to harm him. Emotionally, sure. But killing him is not part of this plan."

"Right." He can't keep the note of disappointment out of his voice.

She fixes him with a stern look. "Swear you won't kill him. Swear on something that matters."

Dean gives it about one second of thought before shaking his head. "Nothing matters. All I can give you is my word."

"Hm." She considers him for a long moment, and finally nods solemnly. "I like your style."

His own voice echoes in his head, from when he spoke to the demon who told him about this woman: " _So I tell you what: if you help me… I will kill him. Guarantee it._ "

Well, he is officially lying to someone. He guesses he'll figure out who eventually.

"So I take it we've got a deal?" Rowena asks, holding out her small hand.

He looks down at it, thinking only how this is _such_ a better deal than some others he's made that he could mention, and takes it in his own hand, grinning. "Pleasure to do business with you."


	27. Allegiances

_Well… apologies for the long silence, all. I've been… trying to pull my life together. Things are going a lot better now, but expect updates from here on in to be erratic. I don't want to promise you guys anything I can't be sure I can come through on._

* * *

"I'm not certain I follow," says Rowena dubiously. "Instead of a location spell for the object you want, you'd rather one for… my son's bones?"

Every two seconds he tells himself, surely there was a better way, a safer way, to do this. But even if there was, it's way past the time he could've done anything about it. As it happens now… he has an update for Rowena's proposal that he's not willing to go forward without.

No way is he giving her a way to track the Blade. That damn locating spell is still out there—as far as he knows, Cain and Sam and Crowley and everyone in between know exactly where he is. They could all be on his ass shortly after he's back topside. He does not need this witch knowing too.

But at the same time, no _way_ is he letting anyone take the Blade away from him again.

"Can you do it?" he says by way of answer.

"Of course," she sniffs, slightly indignant. "It would be significantly simpler in fact. I was near them often when he was alive, of course, at least when he was a wee one, and if they're still where he was initially buried I can even narrow it down to a small plot of land without any magic at all. But how easy it is isn't the issue. Why would you want that?"

He considers how to answer for a moment, and presently decides it's probably best to just be straightforward. "I don't want you being able to track me later on," he says frankly. "This way—"

"But why would you want the bones at all?" she interrupts, beginning to get visibly frustrated. "How could having them benefit you?"

He blinks at her for a moment, slowly realizing. "You… you haven't been around demons much, have you?" If he's being honest, it was years of demon experience on his part before he knew about this little trick. He spends a little longer this time deciding whether to be straightforward. If he knew he could effectively lie, that would absolutely be his best bet. She wants Crowley alive, even unharmed, and if he shares this plan with her…

 _You're a demon now, Dean._

 _What do demons do?_

 _They lie._

"Here's the thing," he finds himself saying. "The strength of a demon is pretty directly tied to their bones. The more intact they are, the better for the demon. Take me, for example. I'm a brand new demon, and a very powerful one. Crowley may've mentioned one or both of those things to you. Whereas a demon whose bones have completely rotted away would be pretty frail, at least by comparison. So they prefer to not give hints as to their bones' location, because if they end up getting burned they lose a lot of their mojo. I'm almost positive Crowley will trade what he stole from me for his bones back."

It's just close enough to the truth to be plausible. The part with using himself as an example was a nice touch, and he gives himself a quick mental pat on the back for it.

By her expression is obvious she's buying it hook, line, and sinker. "File that away for later," she murmurs, and for a few long moments just looks at him, considering. He tries to appear as innocent as possible, given the circumstances. In the lull, though, the fire burning at his core flares up again, reminding him of where he is, and though he manages to withhold the urge to clutch at his chest, a ghost of a grimace crosses his features. Of course, she asks, voice casually unconcerned, "You okay there?"

"Peachy," he deadpans. "So, thoughts on the new terms and service agreement?"

She purses her lips, tilting her head to consider him. Finally, she says only, "I don't like it."

He places his hands together in a praying position, and the irony of the gesture is not lost on him. "Look. I can kill demons, no problem. It wouldn't make sense for me to lie about any of this if I already have that ability. Some hurting may occur. But I'm _not_ going to kill him, because then he couldn't get me what I want."

She stares at him through narrowed eyes.

"You want me to prove it to you? I'll happily do that—killing is one of my favorite pastimes." He has to refocus the dialogue on what she wants out of this. "In the length of time it takes to prepare that spell, I will have Crowley crawling back to you."

She seems to make a split second decision, and her hand goes up right in front of his face, fingers dancing gracefully directly in his line of sight as she murmurs, " _Oculi tui, oculi mei_."

He grabs her wrist, holding it firmly in place, but it's too late. His eyes feel… weird. Tingly. He blinks several times, and snarls, "What the hell did you just do?"

She smiles and replies sweetly, "I'll be keeping an eye. Prove to me you can kill demons on your own, and then we'll be in business. Understood?"

His brows knit together. "Are you gonna stay here?"

"No, no reason to let my son know we've had this conversation. I sometimes take strolls through the archives below; I'll be there. But don't worry, darling—when you kill, I'll know." Again she puts on a saccharine smile and drawls softly, dangerously, "Now release me."

He doesn't want to. Just out of habit. Of spite. Why should he listen to her?

Well… because he needs her help. And as far as he can tell, everything's sorted. No reason to make her angry.

So he lets go of her hand, and she smooths down her dress, smiles one last time, and turns on her heel to exit the room and leave him standing alone.

* * *

Crowley cannot remember a time in his existence when he's had to go through every single day as on edge as he has been of late.

The Winchesters have always… intrigued him. Since shortly after they first came to him for the Colt for the purpose of unloading it into the devil himself, it was clear that they were utterly, ludicrously devoted to doing the "right thing," at every cost to themselves—though not to each other. And that last part has been their downfall, and his headache, each and every bloody time.

So it shouldn't be surprising that now that Dean is in the wind, transformed into something not remotely similar to himself, Sam is so distracted he's turned into a massive screwup in every area he used to be capable. Dean's always been Crowley's favorite, and for a few fleeting weeks, he was on his side, under his thumb. He had such plans, such visions for the two of them. Ruling hell together for all eternity. For the first time in longer than he could remember, possibly his whole existence, he'd felt genuine friendship towards another person—or at least being—and had actual hope that a friendship could indeed form.

But this new Dean was violent, impulsive, and completely uncontrollable, and as much as Crowley wanted to forgive that, he'd simply crossed too many lines. He'd returned him to be changed back into the old Dean, and gone about his life, wishing things could've been different.

Only for Sam to fall short. And now they can't. Seem to. Bring Dean. Back.

Like a fool, he relied on Sam to get the job done. But he couldn't hack it, leaving the job of hunting down Dean bloody Winchester up to Crowley.

He's never been so frustrated. He hasn't relaxed in weeks. And he is more pissed off with the two of them than words can tell.

But when he walks into his throne room alongside three of his underlings to find none other than Dean Winchester himself standing in the middle of the floor, he forgets how to move, how to think. He stands frozen in place, staring at Dean, just trying to process this utterly absurd turn of events and everything it implies.

He looks just like he did during those three weeks they spent hitting all the bars in Beulah—hair fluffed up, jaw set, eyes dark. At least at first glance. As Crowley looks deeper, he is ashamed to realize there's a gnawing terror growing within him. There is something inside Dean that's never been there before. Something dark, and cold, and utterly unlike anything he was before, and the worst part?

He's smiling.

Crowley tries to play it cool. Swallows quietly. Finally gathers the will to ask hoarsely, "How are you here?"

Dean's smile grows, taking on a wry quality. "Exorcism's a bitch."

He shakes his head, and flatly commands his underlings, "Seize him."

They hesitate. Clearly they can see his power too. But one quickly gathers the courage to rush at him, and the other two are emboldened to follow suit.

Crowley stands and watches as Dean spends all of one second concentrating on his hands with his fingers woven together, before pushing his palms outward and releasing a shockwave of power that drops all three of his minions like flies to the ground, shakes the stone foundations of the throne room, and pushes Crowley backwards onto his back. He lies there, winded, his mind blank, feeling the depth of that power as an aftertaste in his mouth. And shortly, Dean appears above him. Standing tall and smirking down at him.

The first thing Crowley thinks to ask, before even sitting up, is "What the hell happened to you?"

He shrugs. "Practice. Time to think. Get up and have a seat, I've got some things to say and I don't want to talk to the floor." He steps away, exiting Crowley's line of sight. Crowley immediately sits up, but Dean's just pacing, stepping casually over the bodies on the dusty floor. He catches Crowley's eye and gestures towards the throne.

Crowley quickly pulls himself to his feet, but spends a few seconds just standing still. Something's missing here. Isn't… isn't Mother usually hanging around in here? If not in the throne room, in one of the adjacent chambers?

Dean's stopped moving, and is watching him closely. "Have you seen anyone else in here?" he asks.

Dean tilts his head. "In hell? It's pretty busy down here."

Crowley scowls. "In this room or any of the adjacent ones. Smartarse." He pauses. "How did you even find this place from the cells?"

He grins. "No. Not till you and your lackies." He gestures again towards the throne. "Sit down."

Crowley finally manages to bat away the majority of his nervousness—Dean doesn't seem to want to hurt him. He crosses his arms, standing his ground. "If you've got something to say to me, say it."

Dean shrugs. "Fine. In a few words: I've been giving it a lot of thought, and time moves slowly. Painfully slowly. Nobody really likes you, so odds are someone's going to off you in the near future and I'll have lost my chance. The one thing you're good at? You're a businessman. Whatever plan you had for the two of us, the 'perfect hell'? I want to hear about it."

Crowley didn't follow that, not at all. A deep crease forms in his forehead, and he tilts his head in a highly dubious gesture. "Last time I tried pitching it to you you were as far from interested as it gets. What's changed?"

Again he shrugs. "I stopped partying. Scratched the surface of what I'm truly capable of. And I'm ready to be all I can be. I'm the new Cain—but bigger and better."

"You've got some balls on you, Squirrel. How are you bigger and better?"

"Because," he says simply, "he was born out of love for his brother. I was born out of revenge."

Crowley considers him for a long moment, and a thought suddenly occurs to him. "Are you the one who burned the suicide palms?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"The trees. For the locating—" He stops, but he can tell by Dean's face he's already said too much. "Never mind."

Dean cocks his head. "So, are we good?"

"I still haven't heard an apology for the way we parted," Crowley tries.

"And you're damn well not gonna. You need me. But that's all right, because I need you. You wanna be safe from your inevitable assassination coming up in a few years? Let me in on your plans. And we can bring this craphole you call hell back to its former glory, and then even better. We can create hell on earth. And it will be better than anything you've ever dreamed of."

Crowley has to admit everything after "I need you" came in something of a blur.

 _I need you._

He doesn't think anyone has _ever_ said that to him.

He was comfortable in his bitterness and anger towards Dean, but he couldn't make himself hate him. He was the only one… well, he was just the only one. The only one who Crowley felt comfortable around, familiar with, understood by. But he walked out the door, and Crowley could find no cause that day to believe he'd have any regrets. Isn't this sudden change of heart far too good to be true?

 _You need me. I need you._

And it's true, isn't it?

Suddenly, Crowley sees a future.

"Fine," he hears himself say, though as he fixes his eyes back on the creature before him, he sees something flash in his eyes, and he is reminded of how much has changed. "One last chance. We've got a great deal to discuss, Squirrel."

He holds up a finger. "Just one thing. That's gotta go. None of this cutesy nickname crap. You're going cold turkey."

He can work with that, honestly, because the use of the nickname just now felt unnatural when applied to the version of Dean standing in front of him. Even calling him "Dean" feels wrong. Which is strange, because physically, he does look like Dean, but in every other way he's unrecognizable. This creature is something entirely new. "You're not Dean Winchester," Crowley says softly. "Dean Winchester died at the hands of Metatron months ago. You're something else."

He crosses his arms, nodding thoughtfully. "You're right," he agrees, and seems to slip into deep consideration for a long moment before saying decisively, "Call me Emery."


	28. Plans

_For the record, I didn't plan on giving Dean a different name. Or if I did, I certainly didn't plan on starting to use it to refer to him in the third-person narrative. But he really has become something else, to the point that continuing to call him Dean would have felt even weirder, I think. So hopefully this decision pays off. By the way, if you forgot where "Emery" came from, it was the name of Dean's last host, the one he was exorcised from._

* * *

Rowena watches her son through Dean Winchester's eyes for all of thirty seconds before the body count begins.

Not only can he kill demons, but he can kill demons _efficiently_. For a moment she holds her breath as she sees the shockwave he sends out knock Fergus flat on his back, but he appears to be fine. Her relief, however, quickly turns to disgust as she watches Dean transform him into a pathetic sniveling worm with just a few words. Even when he's much harsher than Rowena had pictured him being.

Maybe Fergus could use a rousing round of torment to help him get over this ridiculous hangup.

Honestly, what would he do without her?

" _All right_ ," she whispers to Dean Winchester—or Emery, as he's now dubbed himself—as the two of them head from the throne room to a nearby meeting room to sit down and discuss their plans. " _It's a deal._ "

He doesn't react with any abnormal head movements or locutions, fortunately. The spell that gives her a direct feed from his eyes and ears will wear off in another hour or so, but for now she leaves that line open as she continues to stroll through the hallways of the archives and storage rooms beneath the complex around the throne room, beginning to gather up everything she'll need for the locating spell.

It's not the only one she'll be casting, though. She doesn't foresee it being too difficult to concoct a potion she can coat her son's bones with that will ensure they can't be destroyed. Damaged, sure, fine. But not destroyed.

She wonders just who this Dean Winchester was, and what he's become. All she's really heard from Fergus, other than his high opinion of him and his hurt at the "betrayal," is that they've got a history, and that he's very powerful. By the style of his clothes, it's obvious he died very recently. She's not sure how he could have become a demon so quickly, but it almost seems to her like he's a different breed of demon entirely. Like he doesn't operate under the same rules as the rest she's seen.

It worries her, just a bit. She might be in over her head.

She'll have to proceed with extreme caution.

* * *

Crowley has always seemed like nothing more than a businessman to Emery, and Crowley himself has even acknowledged this as the truth. When he became the self-proclaimed king of hell, it didn't really make sense to Emery. He was no leader, and he had never seemed ambitious in the least. But as they sit in the drafty meeting room together, Emery finds himself continually surprised by the loftiness of Crowley's goals.

He says he wants to create "the perfect hell." A kingdom of terror that everyone on earth will fear. He wants to mold the world into a place where nobody will ever deny the existence of demons, because everybody will personally know the fear they bring. He wants to mobilize his troops, spreading havoc strategically across the globe, beginning in bigger cities in first world countries from where the stories will spread far more readily, and gradually reaching the furthest corners of the earth. In the meantime, he wants to return hell to a similar state to what it was before his reign began—when Emery was serving his time all those years ago. To take inventory of all the souls, to train new torturers, to hear constant screaming and weeping. He wants to remake it into something to truly be afraid of. And while Crowley facilitates things in hell, he wants Emery to lead the charge on earth, till every living person knows their names.

There's only one problem. Crowley doesn't seem to have a lot of concrete plans in the working. He has an end goal, but not a game plan. The way Emery sees it, he needs a _lot_ of consultants and experts, but when Emery points this out, Crowley shies away from the idea of asking anyone else for help.

Emery really doesn't care. He has no need for hell on earth, and he's certainly not about to be Crowley's bitch, or to genuinely work with the guy who took the Blade from him. The sole fact that Crowley hasn't offered it already is more than enough evidence that he wants to keep Emery in check. He's afraid of what he'll do if he has the Blade. There can be no trust in this relationship, no matter how much Crowley wants it.

There is something Crowley wants to say or ask, though. After the first hour there have already been three or four instances where he paused, looked at Emery for a while, opened his mouth slightly, paused again, and just continued with what he'd been saying. "You know," Emery observes upon the next such occasion, "this entire time you've been wanting to say something. I suggest you say it."

He glances at Emery, eyes widening slightly. After a short pause he says hesitantly, "I'm… I'm not sure I should."

He raises an eyebrow. "Well now if you don't I'm going to be obligated to root around your head till I find it."

Crowley stares at him, head tilted, for a long moment, before suddenly saying, "I expected you'd be upset. That I took the Blade from you, that I handed you over to Sam. I've seen what you're capable of when you're angry. I just—"

A question is coming. Something about the Blade. Not an offer—definitely just a question. And Emery doesn't know if he'll be able to handle it with grace. He was a professional liar his whole human life, and now that he's a demon, it's never been easier, but the Blade… the Blade is a sore spot, and it could very well crack him.

So he lifts his hand, twitches his fingers ever so slightly, and Crowley's mouth snaps shut.

Emery leans in close, and though he didn't plan it, he feels his eyes go black. And he simply says, "You did those things to Dean."

Crowley stares at him, eyes wide, and Emery leans back again, twitching his fingers again in a casual gesture. Crowley coughs, his hand to his throat, as Emery says, "I think I left the very last piece of Dean behind some months ago, at least. Up there." He props his elbow on his knee and points his index finger upward, indicating the level of hell above them, the cells where he wandered for so long. He purses his lips, thinking. "You know, in all that time I never stopped to do the math. A month is ten years, so what's a day? Man, we'll have this whole plan ready to go before Sam's anywhere close to healed."

Crowley, his throat apparently feeling normal again, says, "Oh, no, it doesn't work like that."

Emery blinks. "What? Of course it works like that. This ain't my first rodeo."

Crowley shakes his head. "The space affected by the time distortion is solely for torture chambers. The entire purpose of the distortion is to accelerate the demonization of the condemned souls. Where we are now, it moves in tandem with the world above."

Emery stares at him. "You're kidding. Why not knock some walls down up there and move the entire base of operations into the space with the time—the—what did you call it?"

"Time distortion."

"Time distortion, man!" he cries. "You'd have a leg up on _everything!_ "

"Hell wasn't _built_ ," Crowley says defensively. "The walls can't be 'knocked down.' It's… it's different, up there. I… I tried renovating, once, but it didn't last. In time, hell returned itself to the way it had been. To the way it's always been."

Emery shakes his head. "Then just repurpose the cells themselves. Conduct meetings sitting on the damn floor, if you have to. It's worth it."

Crowley turns his hand over, searching for a rebuttal, but eventually says, "We can look into it. Anyway—"

"Wait," he says, a question occurring to him. "So then… you know how long I've really been off the radar."

"Yeah. Well, since Moose and Feathers last saw you. I have no idea when you were exorcised; we haven't been in contact since."

"How long?"

"About two weeks."

He blinks. It feels like months, maybe even years since he's been aboveground. Two weeks? Since his last encounter with Sam? He can't wrap his head around it.

"Let's get back to work, shall we?"

"Right. Go on." And Emery has to go back to pretending to give a rat's ass about Crowley's grandiose visions for the future.

Maybe one day he'll regret not putting greater stock in the notion of long-term planning. Maybe one day he'll even regret bailing on the highest possible post he could ever hope to have. But right now, he… he just can't bring himself to be engaged. No position or amount of power can ever hold a candle to the Blade. With every passing hour its call grows stronger. It's even enough to distract him from the hellfire burning at his core. And maybe the time dilation up till now was messing with that somehow, who knows. But whatever the reason, now it feels stronger than ever. It's all he can do not to just close his eyes and dream of the moment he can hold it again.

Crowley doesn't understand. No one does.

But they will.


	29. Biding

Time goes by.

After weeks of rotting on the couch, Sam gradually begins to regain the ability to get around on his own. It takes months, and it sucks, but he can feel his legs improving. Meanwhile Cas is slowly rebuilding his strength, and sometimes Sam sees him looking perfectly normal and whole, just a little worn, and he has to bite back the request _Can't you try to heal me?_

They're in for a fight. Who knows when, but it's coming. And Cas needs to be on top of his game. His damn legs will heal on their own, in time.

They keep trying to get in contact with Crowley. He has most of the phone numbers they usually cycle through, so Sam gets a hold of a new phone and tries with that. The person who picks up is not Crowley—he says his name is Guthrie and that he is responsible for organizing the King's messages, but as soon as Sam identifies himself, the voice on the other end informs him the King is not taking messages from him or the angel Castiel, and promptly hangs up. After weeks of this, of all the tricks he can think of failing to get Crowley on the other end, Sam finally stops trying.

Sometimes Eloise comes around, to check on them. She's always unbreakably stoic, but Sam finds himself warming up to her. He ends up having several long post-midnight conversations with her on the nature of demons and of humanity, and he catches snippets of evidence that Cas has had some long talks with her too.

It's the three-month mark when Cas performs a quick examination of his legs, and tells him the cast on the right can go. Seems the fracture in the left was more serious, but Sam feels better than he has in a long time as he frees his right leg and tests his weight on it.

He takes a short walk that day. It's the first time he's gone outside in almost half a year.

And just two weeks later, the other cast goes as well.

With his new freedom of movement, Sam quickly takes to often wandering into Dean's bedroom to sit in the chair across from the bed where his body still lies and just stare at it. Watch his chest rise and fall, rise and fall. He constructs a scenario in his head wherein this really is Dean, soul and all, just trapped in a supernatural coma of some kind, while they're off trying to find the only creature with the ability to wake him up. Sometimes, he approaches the bedside and kneels down, bringing his own eyes inches from Dean's face, watching him breathe. But he never touches him, no matter how often he wants to.

In the meantime, he gets back to hunting. He tries not to wander too far from the bunker, or take on cases that sound too challenging, but he needs a new case at least every two weeks so he can feel useful. Even if it's to strangers instead of the one person who has done more for him than anyone else his entire life. Oftentimes Cas accompanies him, even though at times he proves to be more of a liability than anything else—particularly when he's questioning witnesses and involved parties. Even Eloise acts as a consultant once or twice.

Sometimes it turns out a case involves something demonic. Sam always makes sure Cas stays far away from those. And he always catches the demon alive, straps it to a chair, and cuts it almost to pieces with no expression upon his face, until it's screaming that it doesn't know anything about where Dean Winchester is, that nobody does. And when Sam is sure it's telling the truth, he frees it from the pain. Even though that's a luxury he can't give himself. A luxury that Dean will never know again.

* * *

Time goes by.

Crowley is obviously thrilled to be working with him, and it's honestly pathetic. Emery tries his best to act like he sort of cares about the partnership, and really, it doesn't take much. The best parts are when it's clear that Crowley is afraid of him. Happens on the regular, though he tries to hide it.

He frequently meets up with Rowena so he can check on her progress and she can tell him what she thinks of his methods. Apparently, Crowley has stopped talking to her almost entirely. She tries to spark conversation, to tell him that she'll always be there for him, to express concern over his partnership with Emery. By her report, at one point he said, verbatim, "Spare me, Mother. He and I have something you will never understand."

Though he's under no obligation to, often he also tells her about how Operation: Perfect Hell is going. Her eyes fill with excitement as she hears of the progress made in advancing Crowley's plans, but her expression turns sour when Emery talks of his own involvement in them. She's an open book, really. But every once in a while—though none too often—he'll catch a flicker of pride in her eyes too. The first time he sees it, he has to second guess her motivations. Suddenly, he's not sure how she really feels about her son—whether she really cares for him, or if he's just a means to power for her. Once he outright asks her, but her answer is an unhelpfully sarcastic "Oh, I just want to cuddle him close to me as I did when he was a wee bairn."

Emery doesn't sleep. Doesn't need to. It makes it difficult to tell how much time is passing, but at least he starts making trips upstairs with Crowley—if he didn't, it would be nearly impossible. These forays are generally for business meetings and Emery tends to say very little, not paying much attention. Just waiting for the moment the formalities are over with and he can move on to the second phase of the trip: the kill. He missed it while he was wandering around the corridors of hell, he missed it so much. He wishes Crowley weren't involved at all, and he really isn't, though he tries to be. But Emery pretty uncompromisingly just leaves him in his penthouse or wherever he's chosen to hole up for this particular visit aboveground so he can head to the nearest bar or club and find a skull to crack. Crowley imposes a pretty strict time limit, but agreeing to such a limit is the only way Emery can appease him enough that he'll agree not to try to come along.

On the first such trip upstairs, of course, Emery has to secure a host. This new one's name is Paul, but he sticks with the name he's already taken for himself. Paul is his usual—nice and tall, fit, healthy. The most significant divergence is his dirty blond hair. Emery cuts it short on day one. On that same day, he also learns that bringing his host down into hell with him is a trifle. Apparently it should be impossible for such a new demon to have such an easy time of it. Upon being informed of this, he only grins.

Sometimes he thinks about those kids. The ones who put him down here. Now, he's made it work very much to his advantage, but just thinking about how unfathomably _higher_ than them he is… they're like _insects_. They didn't even have the barest trace of an idea of who he was, of _what_ he was. And they, through sheer dumb luck, managed to rip him from the world and hurl him downwards, to quite honestly the worst place somebody can end up. The mere thought of it is humiliating.

The second his work here is done, he's gonna find those three and drag them all straight to hell.

In exchange for a small, specific favor requested by Rowena—to sneak above and get her some useful ingredients she's been running low on—the witch spends half a day or so in the wing of the archives specifically dedicated to types of sigils, and manages to find something called a "binding link." Emery recognizes it from the time Meg locked herself inside Sam's body all those years ago. After verifying how it's supposed to be manifested, he proceeds to pull a branding rod out of storage and sear the sigil into Paul's flesh—effectively making himself immune to future exorcisms.

When he gets his Blade back, he'll be ready for anything.

He'll be unstoppable.


	30. Sigil

_The midseason finale was amazing. That is all, enjoy this chapter._

* * *

Two months after the most debilitating of Sam's injuries have healed, about five after he first received them, after endless weeks of what feels like absolutely nothing, it all comes down to a dusty old book that Castiel almost didn't even touch.

He's read half the library at this point—an exaggeration, because the bunker is enormous, but it sure feels like the truth. He doesn't sleep, and he rarely goes outside. Most of his time not spent on angel radio is spent in the archives and among the countless bookshelves the bunker has to offer. He's read almost every book that had anything to do with demons or sigils or early biblical times.

This particular book isn't all that thick, maybe about an inch. It looks ancient, with a faded brown cover that's hanging on to the binding by a few threads and worn, yellowed pages that crack apart in his hands if he's not careful when he turns them. There is no text on the outside and it's written in an old dialect of French. And he found it standing on its fragile binding on the floor between the back of a shelf and a wall.

He almost decided it wasn't worth fishing out. And he doesn't know what made him elect to put in the effort. But he almost can't believe what he finds about halfway through, to the point that he has to rush downstairs to ask Sam for a second opinion.

Half an hour later, they're standing in the middle of the main study with Eloise, ready to be transported to Shreveport, Louisiana to intervene in a case Sam recently contacted another hunter about—it was too far off their usual reservation so he asked a local hunter named Laura to take care of it. But it was definitely something demonic, and it's the last they've heard of any demonic activity, and they need a guinea pig to test this on.

According to the book, it's a sigil that, when painted on a person's face in a demon's blood, will draw that demon into that person's body. The catch—part of the sigil is the demon's name written in ancient Sanskrit. Its original, human name.

Sam's clearly ready to pull all the stops to get this one to spill its guts. He's already managed to convince Laura to have the sigil painted on her face, and that was no easy task, it's more than clear. And when they do manage to pin down the creature and toss it into a devil's trap in Laura's basement, with Laura, Eloise, and Castiel standing behind him, he starts out nice, saying, "I'm gonna make this simple for you. You're going to tell me your name—your _real name_ , not some alias you've come up with, not the name of your host, but your real. Original. Human. Name."

"Arnold Schwarzenegger," it replies without missing a beat.

He doesn't glare. Doesn't roll his eyes. Just sprinkles holy water over his demon-killing knife, and jams it into the creature's thigh.

It screams. An unbridled, primal release of pure agony, as the burnt orange visage of its charred skeleton crackles like lightning underneath its host's skin. Sam doesn't even blink. Castiel isn't exactly surprised, because he's seen him like this before, especially when Dean's on the line, but it never gets any easier to witness. "Dammit, why do you want to know?" it shrieks near the end.

"I'm asking the questions here. Now once more: what's your name? I promise you won't hear me ask again."

Laura is standing beside Castiel, in a devil's trap of her own, and he can just feel her doubting the wisdom of her involvement. It's a fair doubt to have when Sam is like this.

Another flippant retort trembles obviously on the creature's lips. After giving it just enough time to answer twice, Sam raises the knife again, and it cries, "All right, all right! It was Rishyasringa."

"Can you write that in Sanskrit?" Sam immediately asks Castiel, and he nods. Sam silently hands him the knife, now coated in the demon's blood, and Castiel runs his thumb across the side of the blade, turns to Laura, and begins to trace the blood over her face. She looks very nervous at this point, but as he begins to draw the sigil on her face, she closes her eyes and compliantly refrains from all movement.

He hears Sam's flat words to the creature as he stabs a mundane knife into it and begins collecting more blood, "If you're lying, I won't kill you. That would be wasteful." And he cringes, for the millionth time just wishing the Winchesters peace, but he continues to draw. When he runs out of blood on the blade of the knife, he takes the now-full bowl from Sam.

The moment he finishes the last part of the sigil, the demon's name—which is difficult to fit on Laura's face—he hears its scream behind him, and instinctively leaps out of the way, because the energy in the room has just shifted dramatically.

He and Sam stand back in watch, awestruck and horrified, as the demon screams itself right out of its host, flooding out of his mouth, much like in an exorcism, only instead of disappearing through the ceiling or floor, the smoke cloud billows straight across the room and into the mouth of Laura. She screams as well as it flows into her, and for a good five seconds the demon fills the center of the room, one end in its original host and the other in its new one.

Finally, its first host drops to the floor, gasping, as its tail end leaves his mouth, and moments later Laura's eyes are black. This is, of course, when Castiel and Sam both begin to recite an exorcism in unison. The demon glares at them with hate in its eyes, and even Castiel is perturbed by the sight of the young black-eyed woman with blood all over her face who, minutes before, appeared perfectly normal and happy. But now is not the time to be affected by such things, and moments later the demon has been expelled from her, and she is on the floor gasping. Sam's expression is characterized by both exhaustion and ecstasy, and Castiel is far, far more perturbed by how long this reaction keeps him standing still, staring at the young woman nearly crying on the floor. Castiel doesn't witness the moment he shakes out of it, because he himself strides forward to help her stand back up and support her in whatever way he can. It's mere seconds later that he is joined by Sam.

A few minutes later, as Sam helps Laura clean herself up, Eloise comes to stand by Castiel. She quietly murmurs, "He is hurting badly."

Castiel swallows. It's nothing he didn't already know, but somehow hearing it said aloud makes him feel that much more helpless in the face of it. "He is."

She doesn't say anything else. Not until she's transporting then back to the bunker and renewing the deal they first made, which seems to have become her goodbye. And then she is gone.

She was right about Sam. But they're so much closer now to getting what he needs than they have ever been in the months since they lost Dean. Granted, there are still so many missing pieces to the solution, the first of which is actually _finding_ him, but now, when they do… they'll have a plan.

Castiel can't express how proud he is at having found that book.

* * *

Emery thinks he hates Crowley even more than Dean did.

Of course, that's in large part due to the circumstances. Pretending to give even one percent of a crap about his plans is exhausting, and at times he starts to slip out of the act, but he knows Rowena is keeping very close tabs on him and her progress slows down when his resolve starts to shake. So, in the interest of fairness—though he's not sure why he cares about fairness—he really does try to pretend.

It's so difficult to get away from Crowley though, just for a little room to breathe. He could threaten him easily, scare him into backing off, but Rowena has discouraged that as well. She wants him to be as amicable as possible, which makes sense for her goals, but when he's reasonably sure she's not around or watching in any other capacity, he tends to be very short with Crowley. Then the guy will give him some space for a little while, and soon enough Emery will have to approach him and act all buddy buddy again, never actually apologizing because screw that noise, but nonverbally communicating a willingness to be more patient now.

This cycle goes on for weeks. As the frequency in trips above increases, Emery's patience decreases. Every time he manages to snag Rowena only to be told the spell still isn't ready, he wants to scream.

It's about two months after he makes his near-literal deal with the devil that he descends to the lower levels of hell to find Rowena and demand a detailed report, and she finds him first, bearing the words, "It's ready."


	31. Obsession

_Merry Christmas! In the spirit of giving, I am planning on a total of three chapters in December—so the last one, this one, and one more coming in the next week or so._

* * *

Adelaide doesn't know herself anymore.

In the months Noah has been gone, his absence has invaded her quiet hours, her mornings and nights, her meals, her work, everything. There is no moment that is safe from it, no corner of the house or the family that isn't a little bit darker.

It's all so… senseless.

The thought she keeps circling back to is if he'd just been standing a few feet off to the side, maybe he would've lived. Maybe the force that ended his life wouldn't have reached him, or if it did, maybe something could've been different, he would've not been thrown up so high, or hit a weaker part of the ceiling or landed on some of the hay that was piled against the walls in some areas.

It's useless to think about these things but she does about a hundred times a day. She doesn't recall what she used to think about. What were her hobbies? Art, music… lately… hunting.

Since Emery, since that monster took her brother away and destroyed her life, at any given time her emotional state has fallen into one of two categories. Sometimes she is deeply and irrevocably unhappy, empty even, with little to no energy and barely any capacity to stand, let alone smile. Other times, she's angry. Angry almost to the point of boiling over. She snaps at her parents, her brother, her teachers, her friends, Cody, Walter.

When she has energy, it manifests as relentless rage. And there's been only one thing to channel that rage into.

She used to only hunt with Noah and Cody. They were a team. They'd been hunting for about six months when it happened, totaling no more than five or six jobs. But now, it's the only thing that seems worth doing. She's constantly taking the car she and Noah used to share on long road trips, often leaving in the middle of the night, to check out each and every news story that seems remotely weird. Half the time it's nothing. Most of the rest of the time, it's not what she expects.

She doesn't talk to Cody about it. He knows he doesn't approve, and the old version of her, the version that had Noah, would've agreed. Walter doesn't like it either, and the more often she comes to him for advice and research help, the more hesitant he becomes to answer her questions. Sometimes, because of this, she goes chasing a hunt without consulting him first. She just doesn't want to have to deal with that look in his eyes.

Part of it is truly that nothing else feels worthwhile anymore. But the other part is hoping to find the worm that killed her brother.

Walter's not sure how long it will take for Emery to crawl back out of the pit. He said that as far as he knows, it's pretty unpredictable. But the thought that the world might never be free of Emery leaves Adelaide believing she's never going to rest easy again. It's been only two months and she hasn't come across it yet but she knows she's going to spend the rest of her life chasing it.

There must be a way to kill it. There just _has_ to be. Walter once hinted that he'd heard "legends" of weapons that could kill demons, but he implied both that they were very rare, and that there was no guarantee one would even work against a demon that was immune to devil's traps.

Even if it takes her decades to find one, she's going to find one. And along the way, surely she'll come across some other… home remedies.

Naturally, of course, to find out more about Emery and what he was, she went to the horse's mouth—she snuck a peek at Walter's phone right after Noah's funeral and got Sam Winchester's number. He picked up after one ring with the words " _This is Sam._ "

"My name is Adelaide Walsh," she began without hesitation, having rehearsed what she'd say many times. "My brother, a friend, and I encountered the demon named Emery, the one immune to devil's traps, about a week ago. We managed to exorcise it but I was wondering if you could tell me what you know of it and what, exactly, it is."

" _Ah, Adelaide. Your friend Cody mentioned you. He and, um, Walter? Called several days ago. Told me what happened. I'm very sorry about your brother."_

"Thanks," she said curtly. She'd made the call, of course, during an angry phase, because if she was in her other persona she wouldn't have had the energy to. And so, though tears immediately stung her eyes, she was able to ignore them. "Could you answer the question?"

He was silent for a few seconds. " _You want to know about the demon._ "

"Yes. What do you know about it? Walter said you knew why it was immune to devil's traps."

" _Did he now._ " He sounded exhausted. " _I'll tell you what I told Walter and Cody—he's very dangerous, immune to devil's traps and demon-killing weaponry, and if you ever see him again, the best thing you can do is contact me immediately with your location._ "

"Great, yeah, knew that already." Her voice was thick with impatience. "One more time: what is it?"

There was another pause, and he finally said, still sounding at least as tired as Adelaide sometimes felt, " _Look. It might not make sense to you, but that's a very personal question, one that I'm simply not going to answer, for my own reasons. I'm sorry._ "

She stood there in the middle of her room with her mouth hanging open, hot anger and indignation rising inside her, but no words found their way to her tongue. And Sam said, " _But please, for your own safety, do let me know if you see him again_ ," and hung up.

She wanted to scream. And she immediately ran downstairs, got into her car, and started on a meandering drive so she could do just that without anyone hearing.

Needless to say, that son of a bitch has been no use. In light of his refusal to help, she's had to do her own research, which has yielded nothing. And so, just a week ago, she snuck several pictures of Walter's address book, and called everyone up, asking if they had any unconventional solutions to demons or anything at all that might work against higher level ones.

Most of them haven't had anything for her. Many have given her numbers for other hunters. That second tier gave her the most promising lead she's come across, when the hunter said, "I did come across a witch a while back who had this old book with a page that detailed a supposedly 'more powerful' devil's trap. It was this strange sigil that has to be painted in a mix of lamb and human blood but her notes were… pretty crazy, let's just say, so I couldn't decipher too much else. I haven't encountered a demon in the year or two since that hunt, so I've never tested it, but I'll send you a photo."

The sigil's appearance on its own is pretty disturbing and dishearteningly intricate, but Adelaide has been doing her best to commit it to memory. Part of her hopes she'll never have to try it. The other part has, perhaps irrationally, grimly accepted that she will.

Sometimes, when she's lying in bed at night, or staring at the wall in her room, or listening to her phone ring and just watching "CODY" light up the screen, she spaces out, picturing where that creature is now. She's always pictured hell to be pure fire. She doubts it's anything like what Dante described, but his writings paint a picture far more horrible than anything she could imagine. And yet, somehow, it seems too tame for that monster.

She knows how damaging it is to her, spiritually, to think like this, but she doesn't lift a finger to stop herself from hoping that _thing_ is in even worse pain than she is.

* * *

Emery's tired of hell.

He's tired of Crowley.

He's tired of going back and forth from here to earth and back.

He's tired of checking in on Rowena.

He's tired of not having the Blade.

So when she says, "It's ready," with such a calm, relaxed smile, completely unacknowledging of how much he's been suffering, showing enough leisure to make it apparent that telling him was not the first thing she did upon the spell's completion, he doesn't stop himself from slamming her against the wall.

"Bitch," he snarls, and she's wearing the same casual expression, but behind her eyes, he can see how frightened she is. "How _long_ has it been ready?"

"You're like an addict," she whispers, though her voice shakes. "Try to control that temper. If you kill me, you can't get your precious weapon."

Even as he glares, he draws in deep breaths, realizing every word is true, and abruptly steps back. She rubs her upper chest, smooths down her dress, and says sternly, "There'll be no more outbursts like that. Come with me."

He follows her, excitement now mounting through the initial anger, to the dank old storage room in the archives she's taken as a workstation. There's not much to the room—a few crates of books and materials, and a creaky old table with an equally ancient chair. Dust and slime covers the walls and floor. He understands why she wants a higher position around here.

On the table sits a wooden bowl, an open book, and several jars half-filled with unsavory materials like blood, bones, fur, and what appears to be… urine? Emery turns his attention to the bowl then, which definitely contains some measure of each material, plus what appears to be a snippet of Crowley's hair floating in the middle.

Rowena stands by the table with the bowl in front of her and looks at Emery, silently signaling she's about to do the deed.

It's nothing particularly showy. Certainly nothing he hasn't seen many times before, given his former line of work. She strikes a match, reciting an incantation in a language he doesn't recognize, and tosses the match into the bowl, which ignites with blue flame almost reaching the ceiling, and dies down almost as quickly. She stands still for a long moment, staring down into the mixture in the bowl as it settles back down, and turns towards him. "The bones are in Guam," she says certainly.

"Guam." He frowns. "Where is that exactly? South-ish Pacific, right?"

She looks at him pensively for a long moment, and abruptly heads towards the door, beckoning him to follow. Several minutes later, she leads him into a room filled to the brim with maps and atlases, and strides over to the largest one, occupying a lot of wall space. "This is about two hundred years out of date, but the land masses are the same." She alights a finger on a small island about a thousand miles east of the Philippines. "That's Guam. Do you think you can get us there?"

He stares at the tiny bit of green with a knot between his brows. He's never teleported somewhere he's never been before. He had been beginning to theorize about a way he could do it, by picturing somewhere he _has_ been, then using his teleport-sense to work his way mentally to the new location, but this is thousands of miles away from anything he's ever seen. It's a lofty challenge, to say the least. "I'm not sure," he says frankly, still fixed on the map.

A pause, and then a light huff from her direction. "Well, a teleport spell wasn't part of the bargain, dearie. If you can't get there, that's not my problem."

"You know what the deal was," he deadpans, still not turning around. "Your son's bones for a breach of trust. You're not finished till his bones are in my hands. I might be able to do it. Just give me some time."

With these words he turns, sits down cross-legged on the floor right where he was standing, and closes his eyes. He pictures the point furthest west he's familiar with—a safehouse just outside Sacramento where he and Sam stayed for three weeks when Dad—when John was on a hunt once. Dean was eight at the time, Sam four. The house was owned by a recently deceased hunter whom John had known. They'd come to call it home by the time they had to leave.

None of that matters. Not anymore. Once De—Emery's there, he starts pulling himself west, gradually gaining speed until he's covering several miles each second. Soon enough, he hits water, and keeps going.

Seconds stretch into minutes, stretch into hours. He's lost awareness of whether or not Rowena's even still present.

He hasn't seen the ocean in years, and in fact has never seen the Pacific, which, he is beginning to remember, is the largest body of water in the world.

Doesn't matter.

Scouring the globe for a tiny island is still better than scouring it for the Blade.


	32. Ache

"Sam," Cas says over dinner one night, "can we go through our plan in regards to Dean?"

Sam stops chewing. For one, because it was the very abrupt broaching of a pretty touchy subject. For another… because he's actually gone almost all day without thinking about Dean.

 _You absolute son of a bitch_ , jeers one of the voices in his head, the most deprecatory one that's been fairly active of late.

For what felt like ages, a feat like this was impossible. His brother was on his mind 24/7, and honestly? It was exhausting. Especially considering how little there really was to be done. After a while, even if it was against his wishes… his brain seems to have learned to cope. To figure out what's healthy, and what's excessive.

Well, screw that. When did he start placing mental health above Dean? They're eating a goddamn family dinner right now. It took Sam like half an hour to prepare it. Cas doesn't even need food. When did they start actually eating again? What the hell is wrong with them?

He looks up at Cas, who's been waiting patiently for an answer for several seconds. Realizes he still hasn't finished chewing, and does so. Cas is still waiting as he swallows and finally says, voice shuddering just a touch, "Uh… we don't have much of a plan right now. We're just waiting."

 _Goddamn it, you don't even have a plan?_ the voice shrieks in indignation. _So how is it that you spent half a freaking hour making dinner instead of making a plan?_

"Waiting for him to get back?" Cas supplies.

"Um. Yeah, I guess." _You guess?_ mocks the voice, and he pushes it down. "I mean, yes. We won't know when it happens, so we'll just have to do what we were doing before—keep in touch with other hunters and hope one of them finds him for us. Or maybe Eloise will. Or, though this seems to _really_ be a stretch, maybe Crowley will find him in hell and get in touch with us."

Cas pushes his green beans around with his fork for a few seconds. "Say we do find him," he says at length. "How do we contain him?"

"Look, Cas…" He swallows. "We have all questions and no answers. But we're looking for answers. And that's just the best we've got right now. I've tried everything I could think of, believe me. Weeks ago I put out a plea to every hunter in my address book for any information they had on extra strength demon-fighting methods. How to trap them, hurt them, control them, influence them in any way. I asked them to ask their friends, and to ask their friends to ask their friends. Very few of them got back to me, and they gave me nothing I haven't heard of before." He releases a shaky sigh. "We've seen and fought more than anyone else I've ever known. If we don't know something, the chances of anyone else knowing it… aren't high, let's just say."

Cas stares down at his plate. Sam knows he's going to say something else, and he doesn't know what that will be, but suddenly, he's convinced it won't be something he wants to hear. He slams his fork down onto the table harder than he planned to, making Cas jump, and immediately takes a second to calm himself down, while Cas just watches him in confusion.

Finally, Sam says quietly, "There's nothing else, Cas." He stares down at his own plate for another long second, and goes on, voice cracking in a way it hasn't in a long time, "And it _sucks_ , because I never… I _never_ wanted to let him down like this again."

"Sam," Cas tries, "you won't. You never could."

He shakes his head at the hollow words. "I already have," he says softly. "By letting him go this far. He'll never, ever be the same again. There's no getting around that. We are at a point where I wish every day that he'd just died. Because maybe he could've come back from it. And even if he didn't, he'd be happy—and he'd still be himself. He doesn't exist anymore, Cas. And not existing is something I don't understand. Not in the way I understand death." He heaves a long, deep breath. "It was supposed to be me, burning the world. I was supposed to be a monster. The boy king. And even though everyone was telling him to, even though I did horrible, unforgiveable things and walked right out the door on him, he still wouldn't give up on me. He never stopped protecting me." Tears sting his eyes, and he rubs them roughly. "I told him I didn't want to be brothers."

In comes Cas again, like clockwork, to try to do damage control. "I'm sure he forgave you a long time ago."

Sam glances up at him. "No Cas, not long after he got the Mark. I've been an ass to him my whole life."

Even Cas looks dumbstruck by his stupidity. Sam can't blame him. Finally he says, voice almost completely lacking energy, "Just rest assured that when we do get a line on him—and we will, sooner or later—I will show no mercy to the thing he has become. He wouldn't want me to."

He doesn't look up at Cas again. They spend the rest of the meal in silence. Half an hour later, after Sam loads the dishwasher and sits alone in the kitchen for twenty minutes drinking scotch, he makes his way upstairs to Dean's room.

As ever, he lowers himself into the chair positioned near the head of the bed. As ever, he leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees and his chin on his clasped hands.

He can't count the number of times he's come in here since his legs healed. But he's never talked to Dean before.

He doesn't know what drives him to now, but he says softly, "Hey, Dean."

The empty body of his brother doesn't respond. But it doesn't matter. He hasn't said those words in who knows how long and he draws in a deep, shaky breath, tears trembling on his lashes, at the taste of the words in his mouth. After rubbing his eyes roughly and checking once again for movement on Dean's part, he manages to go on, "We're… hurting without you. Which I'm sure comes as a surprise to exactly no one, but." He considers Dean's peaceful face for a while, and leans back. "It's worse than the times you were dead. Way worse. You're not around, Dean. And it's not your fault at all, but…" He shakes his head, giving up on trying to keep the quivering in his voice under control. "It's just something we have to deal with. Now, _how_ we do that… There's a few paths different people I know would recommend that I take. Path one: stop caring. Treat this like a hunt, and find something, or someone, that can kill the thing you've become. Accept that you're gone forever. Path two: give up. Leave you alone. From there, probably spiral into alcoholism and die in a botched hunt a couple months down the road. Path three: keep trying. Likely never succeed. Tear myself apart and quite possibly lose my mind." He runs a hand through his hair, grasping a handful in his fist and leaving it there. "So what am I supposed to do?"

 _You know_ , whispers Dean's voice in the back of his mind. _You know what I'd say._

He rubs the side of his jaw. "You'd want me to kill you—and maybe you're so far down that hole of not existing that I shouldn't hesitate to do that. But then I think, it's not _just_ about what you deserve, the world _needs_ you." He chuckles sardonically. "Selfish. I know. But I've seen the lives you've changed, Dean. I never told you this, but… but I've never met a better person than you. No one tries harder, no one's given more than you have. And that is exactly the reason you're in this situation now. You gave too much. You gave yourself over. You were a candle, burning yourself up to give others light."

 _Cut it out with the poetry, Sammy. Get the job done._

He's silent for a long moment. And he starts to reach his hand out towards Dean's face.

In all this time, he's never touched him.

Now, as he lays his palm, albeit for the briefest moment, against his cheek, he finds it still warm.

Sam draws the hand back and stares down at it, flexing his fingers, and quickly looks back up at Dean. Still hasn't moved. It's getting predictable at this point. He considers his sleeping brother, and says, "You once told me… or at least some version of me… that to have a soul is to suffer." He shakes his head. "You were right. I can't go down those other paths. This is the worst thing I have ever experienced but it's the only road for me. For us. And I'm gonna get you out of this, Dean. And be there to pick up whatever pieces of you remain afterwards. I promise."


	33. Bones

The ocean is _enormous_.

He doesn't know how long he spends sitting on the floor, searching endless miles of water for one little island he's barely heard of before, much less visited. Probably hours, at least. But he can't stop, because if he loses his place, he doesn't know if he'll be able to find it again.

Dean would never have had the patience for this. He hated libraries, hated research. He got better at it over the years, growing in maturity and mental stamina, at least to some degree, but he never in a million years would have willingly sat down to scour however many millions of square miles this is. Not even if it were possible for the human brain to do something like that. He would've passed it off to Sam, most likely. Dean wouldn't have had what it takes.

 _Damn good thing he's gone._

It's only the focus lent by having such an important and specific end goal, the ability to concentrate on the one thing he wants, the one thing he _needs_ , that allows Emery to do it. Because it truly is mind-numbing work.

By the time he finally finds an island that, from above, looks vaguely like the one he's been searching for, he's almost forgotten who he is. Not that who he is matters. Not that anything matters but the Blade. He tries to call Rowena's name, but isn't sure it makes it out into the air. He just keeps all his focus trained on that shape, because if he loses it, he doesn't know what will happen.

It all looks… fuzzy. It's not coming in visually—hell, he doesn't know what to call this sense other than teleport-sense, but he certainly can't use it to spy on anyone. Maybe if he continues to hone it, that could be a possibility. But for now, he's lucky he got this far.

How he'll know when Rowena is there with him, he can't figure. He just knows she has to be present or he'll land on an island of a few hundred square miles and spend however long it takes tearing it apart looking for Crowley's bones and drawing all sorts of attention. She has to lead him.

And suddenly, probably some time after the fact, he registers a small hand gripping his wrist, his wrist which he hasn't even felt in who knows how long, and before all his concentration dissipates he pulls himself and her over to the island he's found.

He's falling over backwards into the dirt then, looking around wildly at the mess of green and black and orange around him, and someone else's voice floats in the air and suddenly he registers that the orange he saw was her hair.

Rowena stands in front of him, wearing a different dress than the last one he saw her in, her hair and makeup a bit different, looking down at him in bewilderment. There's no worry there, because he's never given her a reason to think she'd ever need to worry about him, but there's perhaps something similar in her eyes. "Oi, can you hear me?" finally registers with him, and he blinks up at her for several more seconds, processing what's behind her. Trees. It's very dark, but it looks like it might be about to give way to dawn soon. He gets the sense they're not deep in the woods, but there certainly aren't any other people around right now.

He struggles to his feet, breathing carefully, because breathing is a habit he still hasn't managed to kick. And the first thing he thinks to ask is, "How long was I looking?"

She takes a moment to process the question, and hesitantly responds, "S… seventeen hours, thereabouts."

Emery turns the number over in his head, thinking deeply on how much time that is, in context. "Did Crowley come looking for me during that time?"

"He asked me if I'd seen you. I said you'd probably gone above without asking again."

"Fair enough." He looks around, and, seeing nothing of interest, asks, "All right, Guam. Where to now?"

Clearly she was waiting for the question, because she readily points and says, "Not too far that way. About five miles."

Just three jumps later, they find themselves standing in front of a line of statues of the Apostles with their names carved in gold above their heads on a stone entryway which reads "Pigo Catholic Cemetery." Sea breeze ruffles their hair and the steady sound of waves comes from just beyond.

"I'd wager they're in the finest crypt this place has to offer," surmises Rowena in reference to the bones, and Emery, knowing Crowley, can't disagree. A moment later they're standing in the center of the small plot of graves, about three hundred by three hundred feet, and Rowena concentrates for a moment before pointing once more.

Emery almost can't contain himself. They're one leisurely stroll away from the first concrete progress he'll have made since he lost the Blade. And on the tiny chance that his expertise as a tormenter isn't enough to get Crowley to spill, at least he'll have the satisfaction of, at long last, killing him.

They approach a crypt bearing the name Isa Taisacan—the only evidence in sight of a person important enough to get her own crypt. Evidently, she was also important enough for Crowley to remove her bones and settle his down in their place. Emery vaguely wonders if she's in hell. Probably not too likely, but it bears consideration.

He twitches a finger, and the heavy stone door to the crypt rolls aside, revealing a short descent into a fairly small space. Emery is keenly aware that the only reason he isn't completely blind is that he is… well, what he is. Rowena likely can't see a thing in the dark. So he says, instinctively speaking quietly, "Stay here," and begins the descent.

A mere six steps down, he finds himself at the bottom, rib vaults arching a few feet overhead, and in front of him stands a grave supporting a statue of a fairly young woman lying on her back, her hands folded over her abdomen, and a crucifix on the wall at her head watching her rest.

Emery stops for a long moment, staring at it. He doesn't know why.

Putting it out of his mind as completely as he can, he moves the lid of several hundred pounds off to the side with another flick of his wrist, carefully lowering it to the floor. No need to alert the locals with any huge sounds.

Lying before him are the earthly remains of Fergus MacLeod. An ordinary-looking skeleton assembled with the care of somebody sentimental, rather than just dumped in like they could've been.

There's something tucked into the corner of the coffin that sticks out like a sore thumb, though. He cranes his neck to get a better look at it, and for a long moment just blinks, not quite understanding what he's seeing, and why, and how.

It's also a bone.

The jawbone of a donkey.

It's the First Blade.

Emery stares, dumbstruck, not able to quite convince himself what what he's looking at is really there. His mind is blank. This was not part of the plan.

He hid the Blade… with his bones.

There's no frigging way.

Gingerly, more slowly than he can stand, but still not slowly enough to show the proper reverence for this moment, he reaches into the crypt. As his hand closes around the handle, the invisible Mark that still burns within him reacts—aggressively.

Red tinges the edges of his vision. Veins pop out of his arm as he grasps it as hard as he can, unable to loosen his muscles, and not even caring. Energy, pure lust for blood and power and violence, courses through him until every inch of his host's body is filled with it, and an enormous ragged gasp tears out of him, tears leaking from his eyes. He didn't even know he was capable of crying anymore.

It's like coming home.

It's like being… released.

Rowena's voice from behind him sounds, again with a note of puzzlement rather than concern, and he turns, his arm still trembling, fist still clenched tight as it can be. Each step is a process in and of itself. He forces himself forward, overwhelmed by the Blade and the Mark working in tandem to completely consume him, until he feels the pale light of dawn illuminating his face, and he turns it upwards to stare at Rowena's perplexed one. She glances at the Blade in his hand, and back at him, fear tinging her expression.

Emery, likewise, glances down at the Blade, and back at her.

He doesn't even think. He just thrusts the Blade upwards, straight through her abdomen, and lets out another gasp, just as raw as the first, in conjunction with her gargled scream as she's hoisted upwards into the air above him. For a long moment she just hangs, kebabed, on the Blade, staring down at him, her mouth still open wide in shock, her blood running swiftly down his arm and under his sleeve. And he can see the light, like a real, visible phenomenon, dying in her eyes.

The kill pumps through his veins like a drug, like his very source of life, because that's what it is. It's the only thing that's worth anything. The only thing that ever will be again.

With only a modicum of intentionality he tilts his arm to the side and allows her to slide off the Blade, landing hard on the stone steps beside him. All thought of the crucifix, of Sam, flows right out of him. He kisses the Blade, smearing Rowena's blood on his lips, and screams into the sky, just to release a small fraction of the energy now flooding every corner of his host's body and his own twisted, darkened soul.

And his vision goes completely red.


	34. News

"Sam! Did you hear?"

He's sitting at attention immediately as Cas bursts in from the adjacent library. He's been up for barely enough time to make himself some coffee, but the same clearly can't be said of Cas. "Hear what?"

"Get out your computer. Something happened in Guam. Hundreds of people died. Collapsed buildings, fires, it's been a bloodbath. Started a few hours ago, shortly before dawn." Cas finally makes eye contact to say, "They're saying it was all done by one man."

Sam's on his feet, heading into the next foyer over, where his laptop is sitting on the table. "Description?"

"There isn't one out. Eloise didn't even have one. She's the one who told me to look into the news there."

"She didn't say anything else?" Sam asks, throwing his computer open a little too forcefully.

"No. She's very busy at the moment." He looks grim. "Doing her job."

Sam stares at his home page as the news feed floods with articles on the "Hagåtña attacks." Pictures flash before his eyes of decimated buildings, a sky full of smoke, streets littered with corpses. He starts to scan the articles on the horror undergone by the village of Hagåtña and the surrounding areas and after the first couple has to stop, having seen quite enough.

They're saying that, as of the most recent update, the police had set up a five-mile perimeter around the most dangerous areas, where many officers had already been lost. Sam suspects that there's more the reports don't say. That the surviving officers heard from their comrades just before they ceased communication that bullets were doing nothing, that tear gas was doing nothing, that they didn't know what else to try.

He blinks at the screen, not really seeing it, for a long moment before standing suddenly and looking to Cas. "We need Eloise," he says decisively. "We need her to get us there. Keep trying to contact her." And without waiting for a response, he tears upstairs to change out of his sweats and T-shirt and grab some supplies.

But no weapons. There's not a single gun or blade or explosive that has any hope of helping here.

He just grabs his jeans with his pocket knife in them, because to draw that sigil, they're gonna need Dean's blood.

All the while, a question is tickling the back of his mind—what on earth is Dean doing in Guam? They've never been there, Sam can't think of anything there that would interest Dean, and he's not even sure how he could've gotten there.

Whatever the explanation, it can't be good.

He rushes back downstairs in a flannel and jacket, grabbing his backpack, containing a few choices of containers to catch the blood as well as a couple other items, on the way. In his pockets are his cell phone and a pocket knife. He can think of nothing else that will be needed. But Cas is still standing alone when he arrives back downstairs, and reports, looking rather consternated, "She's out of reach."

For a few seconds Sam just stares at him. He doesn't give a second thought before shouldering off his backpack onto the table next to him, pulling out a chair, taking a seat, and clasping his hands together.

* * *

Walter has known plenty of hunters who haven't been good at retirement. They dip in and out, constantly letting themselves get involved with cases regardless of their attempt to turn their backs on the hunting life. He fully understands that his injury is a major part of why he's been more successful than most at truly hanging up the towel. He knows it's not safe for him to do anything physical anymore. There have been plenty of times when hunters across the country have called him up for advice and research assistance, but he hasn't actually been out in the field since his leg was crushed by a demigod almost eleven years ago.

The only exception was eight months ago, when he started noticing strange goings-on in the house next door. Inside a week he found himself busting in on the only kid in the house and his friend almost getting cut open by an ancient spirit.

He knew it was a good thing that he was there to save their lives that day. He lucked out that his injury was inconsequential during the brief struggle that took place. But then… they got interested. Noah dragged his sister along for one hunt and suddenly they seemed hooked, and Cody was along for the ride too, albeit hesitantly. And every time they came to him for help, he tried to dissuade them. To tell them that they didn't know what this life would do to them, that they didn't understand what they were getting into. But he still gave them what they asked for, because he knew they'd be safer with the information than without.

And then, less than half a year after he came out of retirement, a kid died on his watch.

Every day since, he's thought maybe, just maybe, if he'd been more forceful, if he'd tried harder to discourage them, maybe even if he'd outright refused to facilitate their hunting at all, Noah would still be alive.

The kids used to show up at his doorstep all together, just to hang out or do homework sprawled out on his living room floor. He never turned them away. Sometimes they'd have dinner with him, other times he'd make them snacks, still others he'd end up falling asleep in his room without really interacting with them and waking up to an empty house and a note on his door saying "Thanks for the space!" Sometimes conversation turned to hunting, sometimes it didn't. They were a delight to have and he was always glad to see them, even if their fascination with the paranormal worried him to no end.

Now? Now sometimes Adelaide shows up, bringing at least half a dozen very specific questions pertaining to demons, and sometimes Cody shows up, worrying about Adelaide. They never come together.

And Noah, of course, is gone.

When either of them comes to him, he makes himself take advantage of it as much as possible, even though he's never feeling it anymore, because their presence just reminds him of what used to be. When it's Adelaide, he'll invite her in and offer her some tea, which she rarely accepts, and she'll stand in his kitchen as he prepares a cup for himself, rattling off her questions. He answers them as briefly and tactfully as he can, dropping at least a few hints on how dangerous demons are and how little is definitively known about them, and tries to get some insight on how she's been doing. She's nothing like the girl he first met. Some days she's cold and hard—others, constantly on the verge of tears.

When it's Cody, he goes to immediately get them both a glass of water—he knows Cody doesn't drink tea—and they sit together in the living room, Walter in his recliner and Cody on the couch, and he just listens to Cody talk. Cody tells him how school is going, how the Walshes are doing, and predominantly how much he worries about Adelaide. They still talk regularly, but there are so many things Adelaide refuses to discuss, and he knows she's hiding a lot from him. When Walter sees how profoundly unhappy this makes him, he can never stop himself from sharing everything he's learned from Adelaide since Cody's last visit. They worry together, and sometimes they even pray together, though Walter's not much of a praying man. But nothing particularly actionable is ever said. They don't know how to help her.

She says she wants Emery's head on a stick. But they both know she really just wants Noah back.

They do too. Walter always makes Cody talk at least briefly about his own grieving process, because he also worries that he's using his concern for Adelaide as a sort of distraction. Mainly because Walter has been guilty of the same thing.

The only comfort he can find is that Cody hasn't been hunting since the incident. He seems to be fostering no feelings of anger, no desire for revenge. He's just a very broken kid who's lost one of his closest friends and seems to be in the process of losing the other.

When the kids leave, and Walter goes back to his empty house, he turns on the news. Usually he's keeping an eye out for possible cases Adelaide is involving herself in, or might involve herself in in the near future. If it's something she hasn't mentioned, he's quick to send another hunter to check it out, so he can tell her to stay home if she brings it up. And frequently, he falls asleep on the couch with fresh tears on his face and the TV still on.

One morning after such a night, he wakes up around 7 to find that every news station is covering what they're calling the "Hagåtña attacks." It's a perfectly lovely way to start the day; before even making himself coffee, he sits there for half an hour watching the only photos they have being shown over and over again, and listening to reporters just keep regurgitating the same information—that one perpetrator, a tall Caucasian man, has caused multiple fires and building collapses and killed an estimated two to three hundred people.

As Walter watches—and he's not sure why—a feeling of dread slowly overtakes him.

This could very well be a hunt. But it's so far out of reach, and can have nothing to do with them, there's no sense getting invested in it.

So why does he feel the same way he felt when the kids called him saying they'd found a demon that had stepped right on out of a devil's trap?


	35. Dawn

Rowena draws in a deep gasp, the stabbing pain in her gut greeting her enthusiastically, though it quickly fades into a bad memory as her body reconstructs itself.

She's lying painfully on her side, body pointing downhill, on the stone steps leading down into the crypt. It all seems familiar, though it takes her a few seconds to remember why.

Emery. Emery killed her.

She doesn't know why. She gave him what he wanted. She did everything right.

But maybe she didn't. Maybe she made a terrible mistake, dabbling in forces she truly didn't understand, and unleashed something on the world she has no hope of controlling.

For a long, long time, she lies still. The sky above her is gray, as if shortly after dawn. Usually the resurrection spell works within an hour. But it doesn't sound like dawn—there is no din of early morning traffic, no sound of birdsong.

A few seconds after she starts listening, a distant scream rises, and is cut short.

She shivers involuntarily. Something is very, very wrong.

Deeming it easier than trying to climb to her feet on the steps, she pulls herself the short distance to the bottom, struggling to a standing position once there, and finds herself stood directly in front of the final resting place of Isa Taisacan—at least until her son apparently replaced her bones with his own.

Rowena steps forward hesitantly, peering into the crypt, squinting in the dim light.

The bones are still there.

The bones, which are all Emery has wanted, all he's worked for, for months.

Another scream, this one sustained for the duration, rises somewhere far off.

Rowena stands still in the crypt, her feet suddenly like blocks of cement. She dares not move, and can barely breathe, finding a sudden weight on her chest.

Emery was her ride out of here, back to hell. She never thought she'd yearn to be in that place again, but at least she was left alone there. At least she could count on a bit of peace and plenty of reading material. Here? Here who knows what might happen to her.

She never should have formed an alliance with that monster.

She breathes slowly, closing her eyes, trying to take a critical look at her options. Her son can't know that she was here. She'd put money on the guess that Emery, whether officially or not, has just left his employ, and he'll be finding out soon enough. She can't be within a thousand miles of here. But she has no supplies for a teleportation spell…

Well. There is one way.

But who knows where it will land her, and it's going to cost a lot of blood.

Rowena's always hated that spell. She learned it fairly early on, and she's used it three times in her life to get out of unsavory situations when she had no access to any materials. Each time, she bled for so long she thought she would die, and she was thrown across the world. The only guarantee is that of ending up on solid ground, because you always land over a marked grave. That's part of it. But it could be any marked grave, anywhere in the world.

Doesn't really matter. It's her only option.

But first, she needs a way to draw blood.

Ascending the six steps between her and the surface is a slow business. Each step is a trial on its own. On the second, her head rises above the ground, granting her a limited view of the cemetery.

At first glance, it looks normal. One more step, and her eyes land on the front gate. Torn asunder. Between her and it, several gravestones have been obliterated, fragments strewn across several meters of ground. She notices smoke rising from a few points beyond the walls of the cemetery, some a little too close for comfort.

She sees no evidence of anyone else present. For some reason, that serves only to make her more nervous. Like she can only wait for the other shoe to drop. She wastes no more time in hurrying over to the nearest destroyed gravestone, sifting through its remains, and picking out the sharpest shard she can find.

She rolls her sleeve up, and for a long moment stays still, the shard of stone poised above her pale forearm, as she stares down at the huge, bloody tear in the fabric of her dress over her stomach.

Closing her eyes, gritting her teeth, she swiftly jams the stone into her arm, and begins to chant.

* * *

For the first half hour after Crowley finds out, he does not even begin to register it on an emotional level.

He just sits around his throne room, idly waiting to burn up into nonexistence.

But he never does.

A couple of times demons wander in to give him updates on the situation. He never responds in the slightest. Eventually they stop coming.

Did he know something like this would happen? It feels like he did—or, perhaps, like he should have, but they're very different.

It feels strange to have so little of an emotional reaction.

But then, the alternative would be to _have_ an emotional reaction.

He doesn't know how De—Emery could have acquired the location of the Blade. He doesn't even bother to wonder. It's done now. Their partnership has clearly ended, if it could be said that it even really began. The only place left to move is forward.

He just… has no idea what that even looks like. And he can find no reason to attempt to figure it out.

He still hasn't even moved when Guthrie appears and tells him, "Sire, one of our crossroads demons was summoned by… well, by your mother. She was on King William Island and not in the best of shape."

 _This ought to be good_ , is all he thinks. And thinking it doesn't even feel active—it's just a phrase that runs through his head, but which he finds he doesn't really feel. He gives the tiniest twitch of his hand to indicate Guthrie should send her in.

And then she's striding in, makeup running down her face, and she looks absolutely frightful, pale as death, with a bloody hole in the fabric of her dress over her abdomen and snow covering her head and shoulders. He surveys her silently, impassively, as she blubbers, "King William Island. Canada! That's what your exceptionally brusque underling told me. Where is Emery? What has he done?"

He doesn't react. Perhaps he could find the energy to do so if he tried, but, well, he can't find a reason to try. He just watches her.

Clearly she's uncomfortable, bordering on angry. "Fergus! You must tell me! You placed your trust in him, but now he's gone off, I know he has! He deposited me in the middle of bloody nowhere, and then ran me through! Of course I had a resurrection spell prepared, and I wake up an hour later frozen stiff, with bloody caribou sniffing at my carcass—and then trekking across the tundra trying to find a crossroads, oh my darlin', it was a _nightmare._ "

She's sure giving a lot of unsolicited information. One corner of his mouth turns ever so slightly upwards in the barest hint of a pleasant smile. "Why would he do that?" he inquires, with the tone of someone who knows he's expected to ask but otherwise wouldn't care to.

"Well no doubt to separate us, even he can see we're stronger when we're together," she responds, clearly encouraged by finally being acknowledged. "Can't you see it, Fergus? All this time I've been trying to be there for you, to tell you what a danger he was, and you wouldn't listen! And yes, I'm disappointed, but I'm still your mother, and—"

"Shut up, you whore." He wasn't expecting the words to come from his mouth, but he's not surprised when they do. They're long overdue.

She clearly doesn't feel the same, and appears stunned. "What?"

He leans forward, a motion that represents the most he's moved in the few hours that have passed since he received the news. "I'm nobody's bitch. Not Dean's, and certainly not yours. I'm Crowley. I'm the bloody king of hell. You want on this bandwagon? Fine. You're powerful, there's no denying that. But I run things. You decide nothing. And don't think for a moment I actually trust you. That's a mistake I'll never make again."

She blinks at him, open-mouthed. "I… If that's what you want," she stammers, finally, though it certainly seems she still hasn't figured out how she feels about this development.

He stands, brushing his suit off, turns, and heads towards the door, brushing past her without giving her a second glance. "Come on. We've got a lot of meetings to schedule and conduct, and we're doing it all up in the cells."


End file.
